From the Memoirs of Haruno Sakura
by Raina1
Summary: If it meant choosing between the you I love now for the you who couldn't see me then, I'd take the man you are now over that foolish boy again and again. SasuSaku
1. From the Memoirs of Haruno Sakura

**Disclaimer: **_I don't own Naruto or its characters._

**Author's Note: **_I wrote this a while back and figured I'd post it now that I've retired from writing fan fiction._

**From the memoirs of Haruno Sakura**

By Raina1

* * *

We never think that our children will make the same mistakes that we did. We believe we can teach them better, show them our lives as warnings. Then we wait, and we hope and we pray, oh how we pray! That they don't make the same mistakes we did. Sometimes we get lucky. Sometimes we get to watch them stand up to the trials and life and we get to be proud of them. Other times they disappoint us.

I used to think my daughter was going to be one of the ones who were going to outshine me. I had had such high hopes for her. For the longest time, through her schooling and Academy years, she seemed to be destined for great things. She looked so much like me and sounded like me, it was easy to forget that I wasn't watching myself grow up all over again. It was easy to forget that part of her that wasn't mine, that wasn't even from her father, my late husband. It was that part of her I, almost tragically, oversaw until it was too late.

She was such a sweet child, but again aren't they all like that? Young, innocent, full of smiles and laughter, as if the whole world existed to make life one big party. Then the realities of life the ninja consume them. They become different people then. Strangers.

If I had known what the realities of the kunoichi lifestyle were going to do to my daughter, I would have encouraged her to take a closer look around the world for something else to do with her life.

It wasn't as if she was a horrible ninja. Contrarily, my child was one of the rising stars of the Academy of her year. She held her own with the boys and she was close to her teammates, the pride of her sensei, the pride of Konoha. She flew through those Chuunin Exams on her first attempt. I was so proud, I cried. I don't think I ever cried as many tears of happiness in my whole life as I did watching her put on that Chuunin vest.

Then, when she was fourteen, she met a sixteen-year-old shinobi at the Jounin Exams. I could tell from the first day she came home that my little girl had fallen in love with him. I remember the conversation so well…

"Oh Mom, you should have seen him! He defeated his opponent in twenty seconds. I've never seen anything like him in my whole life!"

"You've plenty of time to see more, sweetheart," I teased her, smiling at the rosy glow in her cheeks. "Have you been able to talk to him?"

She blushed crimson and shook her head. "No, oh no. I'm way out of his league. I don't think he'd notice someone like me."

But he did. If I could have wished for one thing in my whole life was that he had not noticed my little girl's adoring gaze. For the longest time, I didn't know if that boy had truly loved her and was so misguided about it he simply didn't have the common sense to take the consequences into account, or he was only using her for his own ends. So many of my friends and acquaintances have had their own opinions about what that boy really was, it was hard for me to know what to think.

The only thing I remembered was how much my daughter had loved him. The most painful part of it was, when things finally became so bad I had to tell her to stay away from him, and she screamed I didn't understand it was the worst blow to our relationship there ever was. The worst blow because I understood exactly how badly she was hurting. I had been in her place once before in my life. I wanted to share with her my own secrets, to show her my own scars… But she had long ceased to listen to me by then. By that time it was too late and there was nothing that I could have been said that would have changed anything.

Official documents declared that the boy was a traitor and a murderer. A year after he'd made Jounin, he joined a powerful anarchist cell somewhere in Fire Country. To earn his superiors' trust, he'd killed whom he was told to kill, and he stole what he was told to steal. After his family publicly disowned him, he was driven to become a fugitive from Konoha, and his face was added to the bingo book's top targets. He was incredibly dangerous, on the level of S-class, even at such a young age. Not even Naruto, who was Hokage at the time, wanted anyone going after him. He was strictly a 'kill on sight' target for the more powerful Konoha shinobi. All Genin and Chuunin in Fire Country were under strict, expressed orders to retreat if they encountered him.

At first, I thought he had broken off all ties with my daughter. For a long time, regretfully, I suspected nothing was off about my daughter's habits. Most days I came home from the hospital, she wasn't home. She'd leave notes saying she was on a mission, sparring with her team, training with her sensei, so of course I had no clue anything was wrong. She seemed happy enough when we spent time with each other, having dinner, sparring together. Nothing abnormal. She assured me when he had defected that it was over with him; he was no more to her now but a target and a traitor.

"Trust me, Mom, there's no love lost between us. He's an ass and I don't ever want to see him again."

She had lied through her teeth at me. I should have seen it, should have known better, but I didn't. I trusted my girl and I loved her, of course I believed her. I knew that I had no right to feel guilty about regretting trusting her, because I shouldn't have had any reason to not to. We were family. I was supposed to trust her.

When she committed treason for him, she shocked the whole village. I was part of the team sent to hunt them down, partly because of the widely held belief he had manipulated her into betraying the village. Naruto was sure enough of it to send me to talk some sense into her, not that that would have stopped me from going anyway even if he hadn't sent me.

I wish I could erase what I saw that night from my memory.

I was hiding in a tree, my chakra carefully suppressed, when I spotted them crossing across a field. They were holding hands, him in the lead, her behind him. Suddenly, they stopped.

"What's wrong?" my daughter asked, sounding terrified.

"We're being pursued. Your people," he added in an afterthought. He turned to her, his dark eyes cold, unreadable. "You can't be seen with me. You need to leave."

"But what about this?" My daughter held out the scroll she had stolen. The precious burden contained village secrets that no enemy had the right to possess. I remembered how it took all of my self-control to remain concealed when I saw it. That fool girl!

He reached out to take it, hesitated, closed his fist, and then pushed it back at her. "I should not have brought you into this," he muttered, scanning the darkness with his eyes. Finally, he returned his gaze to her. "I need you to do something for me. One last thing."

"Anything." I winced at the desperate need in her voice, the longing on every syllable she spoke.

"Take this scroll back to your people, tell them I threatened to kill you if you didn't steal it. They'll believe that."

She shook her head. "No they won't! And I won't lie! I'm in this as deeply as you are, and I don't care!"

He stared at her, silently.

"I love you! I tell you that all the time and I do enough to show you I do. Look, I don't care about everyone else, okay? I want to be with you. Please. If I leave now, I'll never see you again."

"You'll become a fugitive."

"I already am! Take me with you."

"What about your mother?"

"She'll understand."

"Mine didn't, and I had thought she would. What makes you think yours is going to be any different?" I shivered then, realizing something about the young man, something about him that told me my daughter had inherited something from me… and it was making me remember things about my own youth, seeing it with new eyes.

"She is!" she insisted passionately. "She will, believe me, she'll understand." She took his hand, interlocked her fingers with his, holding it up between them. "Take me with you," she repeated fervently. "I know you don't want to leave me. You told me you couldn't stand having left me, that that's why you came back into the village when you knew it wasn't safe or smart. You don't have to leave me! You can have me. You can always have me. Everyone turned against you but I never did. I never will. You know that."

"Thank you."

She closed her mouth, tears streaking her face, green eyes wide and shining.

I shivered again.

"Your loyalty to me is undeserved and unearned," he spoke lowly, almost humbly. He kissed her, and for a few precious seconds, they remained in that intimate embrace. I should have accosted them then but I didn't. I couldn't.

When they parted, he spoke. "I'm going to ask you one more time."

"My answer is the same."

He sighed, and then held her one last time in a fierce embrace. "You are the only one. There will be no other."

Then, bless that bastard, he knocked my baby out and left her there. When I appeared to retrieve her, we held gazes him and I. He lowered his from mine and bowed his head, in apology to me, before fleeing into the darkness.

It was the last time I saw him alive.

He was killed by a member of the Akatsuki six years later. His remains were found by an ally of Konoha's and respectfully returned to our village. A book found on him contained letters he had written over the years to my daughter that he never sent. I wanted to give them to her but by that time she had retired from the shinobi life due to a back injury and was enthusiastically pursuing a teaching career at the Academy. She had so successfully moved on, I didn't want to burden her with these new memories. The chapter containing that tragic part of my daughter's past was finally over. And I intended to keep it that way.

There was another reason why I never showed her those letters. It was not my right, but I had to know… I had to know what made someone like him do the things he did. Maybe in his words, he could tell me why such horrible, singular ambitions made men like him desert the people who loved them. So I read them. Every single one.

I had only read three of them and I began to cry. To learn he had still loved her with all of the passion he could have had in his life for one woman, I admit I secretly envied my daughter. He had been a murderer, a traitor, a man wanted by every village for his crimes, loved by no one, and there was no one he loved. Except my daughter.

_You made me wish I were something greater than I was, he wrote, you made me see all the things I could have been. A better man would have given up this life for you. A better man wouldn't have done to his family what I did to them. I don't know how things got out of control the way they did. If I had known then what I know now, I would have told that bastard that convinced me to join that anarchist cell to go fuck himself, gone home and married you instead. God, I wish I had done that…_

But there was one letter in which I discovered something I should never have expected. Something that I thought I would not have gotten in all of the years that had passed, how far into the past those memories of mine had been. I couldn't keep it to myself, this one letter, and with the book in my hand, I ran to the Hokage office.

"Naruto!" I told him when I opened the door. "There's something you need to see." My hands were shaking I was trembling so badly.

Naruto looked up from his desk. He saw the book in my hand and frowned. "What is it?"

I shoved the book in his hand. "Just read it." I was almost in tears. "It's the book of letters that kid wrote to my daughter. Read the second to last entry. Mid paragraph."

Slowly, he took the book from me, frowning strangely at me.

_"I fought a man today who claimed to be Uchiha Sasuke. Remember when we used to flip through the bingo book and you got mad at me for making fun of that one nin you said you thought was cute? He definitely looked like the guy, give or take fifteen years. Used some of the most advanced genjutsu techniques I had ever seen. He managed to rip through my memories and replayed the worst parts of them as if they were happening all over again! The bastard nearly killed me! I only barely managed to get away. He tracked me for a day before I doubled back and caught up with him. I had no idea what he wanted with me so I confronted him. He said it was because he'd seen someone he'd known in my memories. Apparently he had known your mother when he was a kid. When I couldn't answer him, he got real quiet. For some strange reason, he thanked me. I asked him, for what, but he never answered me. Then he left."_

Naruto closed the book and put it down. He said nothing for a long time.

"That entry was dated three days before he died," I pointed out. I moved over to the map on the wall behind his desk. "Which means he encountered Sasuke between here," I jabbed my finger on the map, "and here."

Naruto nodded over the top of his folded hands. There was fresh pain in his eyes. "Let it go," he finally said, quietly.

My hand fell. I blinked. "What?"

"I said, let it go." He turned and looked at me, still looking sad, and older than I'd ever seen him. He stared at me for a long time. "If Sasuke wanted anything to do with us, we'd have known a long time ago. This letter," he gestured to the book lying between his hands, "means nothing."

I knew he was right. I left his office that day feeling foolish. Naruto had moved on with his life years ago, and for so many of them, I had as well. We'd grown up, gotten married, and had children. Naruto was still with his sweet wife and had had two wonderful sons, both of them as loud, idiotic and powerful as he was. He had allowed the pain to ease into a dull ache he could live with and still find room for happiness. There were some days I envied him, because for all that, my own fulfillment faded in comparison.

* * *

**

My job at the hospital didn't leave me much in the way of a social life so there had been little opportunity for dating. At eighteen, I met a young man, a rookie med nin with a smart mouth, a sexy smirk and a wink that could melt my bones when I looked at him. I admit, he had done all the pursuing, and I was so astonished, at first I rebuffed his advances thinking he wasn't being serious. But he worked me over diligently to the point where I just up and finally gave in. He was a wonderful catch, everyone said so, and I agreed with them. We married two years after we first met. I gave birth to our daughter five months after the wedding.

But as it usually goes in the way things go for the former Team Kakashi, it wasn't to last very long.

My husband was killed on a mission less than a month after our child was born. Needless to say, our poor daughter never got to know him. It was years later she revealed to me that her sensei had been like a father to her, which made me happy to hear. At least she had had someone to be what I couldn't.

But there was no one to be what I had lost. I was ashamed to learn that day, that one day I read that damn letter that there were some things that never got easier with time.

Though I had given up loving Uchiha Sasuke a decade ago, the very sight of his name in the clumsy handwriting of that young man had given me chills. And hope. Hope I didn't need because it was impossible. Impossible. So I buried that moment, that day, and the words of that letter in the back of my mind. I took the book, put it in a trunk in my attic, and resolved to forget it again. My daughter would find and read the book long after I was dead, hate me for a little while, forgive me to my grave, and then move on with her life again. It was the way I wanted it.

For a while, I was able to put it behind me. After all, I had had years of practice of putting painful memories behind me. They always surfaced in my dreams at night, plagued my nightmares and stung me, but they were only phantoms. They couldn't hurt me the way they used to anymore.

Then, in the funny way of life, it chose to turn my own back on its head again.

In addition to my duties at the hospital, I was also a part time ANBU hunter nin. I was wearing my ANBU fatigues that one fine day when life decided to change irreparably for me. I was coming back from a solo mission. I was in my early forties then, and nearly walking on water. The mission had been a lark and the day was beautiful. I'd stopped by a stream to splash water on my face and clean my gear. I was so distracted by my chore I completely failed to sense the presence of the nin camping by the water a few feet downstream.

"Wow, check this out. Looks like we've got company."

I looked up, startled. A man about my age with gray hair, fierce eyes, sharp teeth and a large broadsword, was watching me.

"Hey!" the gray haired man called over into his shoulder into the woods. "You've got to see the hot number that just showed up. Maybe you know her, she's from your village."

It was nice to know my trim figure was still good enough to attract male attention. But right now I had no time to deal with that. I narrowed my eyes and stood up, my hand closing around my sword behind my back. This looked like trouble, and the prospect of two against one wasn't a desirable one.

"What is it, Suigetsu?" When he stepped out from the trees and we saw each other and I saw the Uchiha fan on his person, my whole world exploded inside of my head. I knew him. He was older, harder, colder, but none of that prevented us from staring at each other in shock. I knew then from the look on his face that he knew me too.

The man with the sharp teeth took note of our combined stunned silence and grinned.

Sasuke cast his gaze to the other man. "Leave us."

He did, surprisingly. Suigetsu grinned again and went off into the woods.

When they were gone, to my surprise, Sasuke made his way over to my side of the shore. I quickly drew my sword and placed it between us.

"Stay where you are." My expression was a careful blank slate. "By order of the Hokage of Konoha, you are a wanted S-class criminal. I am obligated by my loyalty to my village to bring you in or kill you if you resist." I was so proud that my voice stayed as toneless and steady as I did because my heart was pounding so furiously I heard it in my ears.

Sasuke smirked. The way he expressed himself certainly hadn't changed, that was for damn sure. "You've grown out your hair again. It looks nice, but to tell you the truth, you've always looked better with short hair."

I glared at him piqued he would ignore what I said so casually. "You waited that long to finally tell me?" I lowered the sword, since he didn't seem intent on fighting me, and I wasn't up to it anyway. "Almost two decades no one can find you and here I am practically tripping over you on my way home. If I had known we'd find you by not actually looking for you, I would have tried it a long time ago."

Sasuke just smiled, resting one hand on his hip. I could never remember having seen him smile in my life and the affect was almost breathtaking. I took this opportunity to take in the details of his features. It had been a long time since anyone had updated his photo in the bingo book. I wanted to make sure I gave them a good description.

Like what all the years do to us, he had aged. His once beautiful, black-blue hair had gray in it, and grown down to his shoulders. His face had hard lines, with a scar on his lower right cheek. His eyes were as narrow and distrusting as they'd always been. His right eye was cloudy and unfocused; my medic's mind told me it was mostly likely blind. In his youth, he'd been driven, cold, his entire being taut with barely restrained anger. Here he seemed relaxed, tired, almost sad, but uncaring of his own woes at the same time. Sasuke had grown out of his hate, I realized. He had grown out of a lot of things. And gone on.

So I was surprised he seemed almost… glad to see me. Tentatively, I found myself nearly returning his smile. I couldn't. I didn't feel, after what he had done to us, that he deserved a smile from me. But that wound was old, long scarred over, dealt with and put aside. I had no more anger, no more tears, and no more resentment for the man standing in front of me now. I felt… nothing.

Instead I felt an old affection rise up in me. It was so strange. One moment I was ready to battle him to the death, the next I just desperately wanted to grab what I could of this encounter, make it good, heal those damned scars once and for all and finally, finally move the hell on with that part of my life. I needed closure and I needed it while Sasuke was standing in front of me. Wanted it.

So I took him in my arms, held him tightly, and I hugged that sorry son of a bitch.

And he hugged me back.

I nearly cried. That he was still able to weaken my defenses so quickly was astonishing. That this man still had managed, after so long, to keep a tiny portion of my heart alive - I just had no words to express it.

We wound up talking that day. Sat on the bank of that small river and we talked about everything. I told him everything… and when I say I told him everything, I mean exactly that. The short versions, the long versions, and even the secrets of my heart that I didn't dare ever tell another single soul. I did that day exactly what I had wanted to have done all of our lives. All the things I would have told him had he stayed in Konoha had he accepted what I had offered him that night. I even told him about the book of letters and the unfortunate young man who had written them.

And Sasuke listened. He watched me the whole time and he just listened. He asked questions here and there but for the most part he just listened to me. Maybe he did it because he felt he owed me, maybe he was just indulging me because it was one of his infamous whims. Or maybe… maybe he did it because he wanted the same thing I wanted: Closure. Reconciliation. A second chance.

When I was all talked out, as I was wiping the tears from my face, he returned the favor. At first I was astonished, completely taken aback. Quickly I smothered it, just to listen to him speak, to take what I could of what he was choosing to give me.

I won't speak a word of the things he told me on that riverside that day. They were for me only, only me and no one else, and he expressed a desire for me never to repeat a word, as a courtesy. He told me things he said he had not been able to tell anyone else for years.

"Why are you telling me?" I implored, frowning.

He gazed across the river, into the woods. "I don't make a habit of it to harbor any regrets, Sakura," he said then, quietly. "I feel… I owe you. You gave me something at a time when I had needed it most, which made living those tormenting days until the night I left easier to bear. I was much too much of a stupid kid then to appreciate what you had offered me. I've been stupid for years. But," he smirked, "I'm sure I don't need to tell you that."

I smiled. No, he didn't.

"Sakura." He turned and looked at me. "I…" He stopped, checked himself and then spoke again. "The reason you ran into me today was no accident. I knew you were coming home through this way so I chose to wait for you here."

I did not react. Somehow, for some reason, that did not entirely shock me.

"I need to come home."

_I need to come home_. Not, _I want to come home_, but _I need to come home_. "Why?"

He looked away from me then. "I'm… I've been… ill. That's why I asked Suigetsu to come with me. Just far enough to get me here."

Ah. So when he sent him away, he sent him away for good. Suigetsu was not coming back.

"Do you know what's wrong? Or is that why you've…" I didn't need to finish that sentence and he didn't need to answer. "You knew I would help you, didn't you."

"No. I am… surprised you…" Sasuke looked young then, and guilty, and at the same time just so old. His expression looked shuttered, pained. He looked as if he had heard the undeniable truth of what he had always suspected about me and was damning himself fiercely for it. For abandoning it, for letting it go out of his grasp, for all of the years he could have had.

"Sasuke," I said softly, interrupting him. "You can come home. I'll find out what's wrong. You can stay with my daughter and I; it'll be fine."

"Naruto…?" Just saying his name made Sasuke appear fragile.

"I don't know." I sighed. "I want to tell he'd be happy to see you but I don't know anymore. He may not feel as he used to about you. In fact, I know he doesn't. He's ordered enough manhunts to not care whether or not they bring you home alive. He's got the whole village to worry about and his own family."

"And you?" Sasuke gazed at me steadily. "Why is it different with you?"

I smiled at him then, kindly, simply. "I'm a doctor, Sasuke-kun. I won't tell a sick man no. I never have… and I never will."

* * *

I kept my promise. We took an alternate route to Konoha to get home faster and entered the village through a hidden entrance to avoid public scrutiny. Regretfully, I had to put restraints on him, which he accepted without complaint. It was the only way that Naruto's ANBU guards would allow me to escort him up to his office.

Naruto's reaction to seeing Sasuke was understated. He murmured to his assistant to cancel all of his appointments for the day and ordered everyone but myself and Sasuke out his office. I stayed in the background without a word. The strife between the two had always remained between them and only the both of them could deal with it. I'd always been peripheral to their personal problems with each other.

Naruto didn't speak for a very long time, just kind of moving things around on top of his desk before folding his hands in front of him. "You look terrible," he began finally, simply, unsympathetically. "You haven't been taking care of yourself have you?"

"No." Sasuke kept his eyes lowered. "That's… why I'm here."

"Really? Not to destroy the inner working power of our village's government? Not to rekindle your revenge?" Naruto's eyes were like ice. "Everyone who was directly responsible for that has been dead for a long time now."

"Yes. I know."

"Do you still hate the village?"

"It doesn't matter whether or not I hate it. I can't be loyal to it and I don't care about it either."

At least he was honest. I could tell from the expression on Naruto's face, while it wasn't the answer he liked, he appreciated that it was honest. But Sasuke had always been brutally honest about what he thought, and that hadn't changed with the passage of time.

Naruto studied him carefully. "Yet you expect to walk into my office here to ask me, to ask me, to help you. After all the shit you put me through, put us all through. That's pretty goddamn selfish. Where do you get the nerve?" But he didn't sound angry, and he didn't even sound resentful. He was honestly asking Sasuke a question.

"If you won't help me," Sasuke spoke at length, quietly, "and you want me gone, I'll go. If you want me arrested and tried for my defection, I won't fight it. I'm tired, Naruto. I'm tired of pretending…" he faltered. "I'm… tired of the pain."

Naruto seemed moved but I couldn't blame him for still appearing skeptical. "Sasuke," he began at length, with almost amusement, a near smile twitching his lips. "I am not going to send you away and I'm not going to arrest you. The outside may have gotten older and, yes, you wore me down enough to admit when to go on with my life, but I never stopped thinking of you as my brother. Don't apologize for your life, because I won't forgive you if you do. You did what you did, that's the end of it." Naruto smiled at Sasuke's eyes closing against his words. "It's not easy, is it?" Sasuke opened his eyes again. "To be who you are, and what you've been, expecting retribution, and getting forgiveness instead."

"You forgive me?" Sasuke was having a hard time grasping this.

Naruto looked like he wanted to roll his eyes. "Idiot, I forgave you a long time ago. I had you removed from the bingo book three years ago when it became apparent, you'd decided just to wander around aimlessly. That got old, didn't it?" He didn't bother waiting for a reply. "Look, I'll make you a deal. You say you're sick, fine, Sakura is officially in charge of you. If I hear from her you're causing trouble, I will not hesitate to exile you from Konoha. There will be no going back from that, you understand?"

Sasuke nodded.

"All right. You're going to be watched by ANBU night and day so don't be surprised if you happen to spot one – though I doubt you will, since they are the best at what they do." Naruto chuckled.

"I understand." Sasuke moved to go. I came to life and moved to open the door.

"There's one more thing."

Sasuke looked back and waited. I did too.

Naruto's face gentled. "If you can, come by and see me. There's a lot we need to talk about, and I'm not about to let you get out of it. You owe me big time."

Sasuke gave an incline of his head to acknowledge he'd heard and walked out the office door. "Whatever you say… dobe."

Behind him, Naruto laughed, and even though I was the only one who saw it, Sasuke gave a little smile.

* * *

**

Sasuke looked so uncomfortable sitting on that examination table. He hadn't had a medical exam since he was a Genin, so the prospect of getting poked and prodded probably embarrassed the heck out of him. He was so used to not trusting anyone getting within inches of him, I had to stop doing something several times just because he'd lean away, or grab my wrist with his lightening fast reflexes. He'd apologize at the same time I would apologize, which made me laugh several times.

I finished my cursory examinations, the same standards I gave each patient for their standard check-ups, and then sat in a chair across from him.

"Everything seems fine," I reported from my findings on my clipboard. "Respiration and heart rate are normal. Hearing is good. Reflexes are good. Your weight is normal of a man your age and physical health. I'm not a professional optician but my professional opinion is you are legally blind in that eye of yours. I would need to perform a more intensive examination to see whether or not it's treatable." I glanced up. "Would you like to pursue a course of treatment?"

Sasuke shook his head. "That's… it's fine." He looked at me. "It took me five years to adjust to it. I don't need to see out of it."

I nodded and accepted this. The condition was all right if left alone and if he wanted to live that way, well, that was his choice. I had learned a long time ago as a med nin that if someone doesn't wanted to be cured of a minor deformity, I had no right to push it on them.

I waited for him to tell me. I had learned all I could learn from my physical examination.

"After I've been through a battle," he began slowly, "I've started… throwing up blood. It's been going on for two months now. It doesn't get any worse but it hasn't gotten any better." A shadow passed over his face. "I think it may be whatever it was that was killing my brother. It was what I think did him in when we fought."

I frowned, concerned. That didn't sound right… but throwing up blood for no apparent reason was never normal. I had a sneaking suspicion of what it was he was describing but I would need to perform some tests to confirm it. I stood up from my chair, letting the chakra swirl around my hand. "Hold still," I murmured, holding it over his stomach, passing it northward up to his throat area. I nodded to myself, made a note on my chart and then put the clipboard down on the counter, my back to Sasuke.

"What?" Sasuke pressed, narrowing his eyes at me. "You know what it is. I know it's bad and I've accepted that it's probably fatal."

"It is bad," I began, turning back to face him, trying to keep my face and tone neutral. "But it doesn't have to be fatal. I've seen this before. We don't know what it is or what causes it but it's been discovered that those who have quit the life of a shinobi have lived well into old age with this disease. Patients who have refused to retire from the shinobi life, their condition tends to worsen. They develop cardiac problems later and most die of heart attacks or massive blood loss within a few years of diagnosis." My mouth tightened to a thin, grim line. "It's… up to you."

Sasuke noticed the way I was glaring at him, daring him to challenge me. I was advising him to quit being what he'd been trained to be from birth. Most people I know never took well to being told what they felt they were born to do they had to stop being. To me surprise, he only nodded, his face its continual blank. "I understand."

I nipped the bottom corner of one lip. "Will you?"

Sasuke's eyes connected with mine. "Order it, and I'll do it."

I was perplexed. "Do what?"

"Tell me it's not possible, and I'll believe you. I need to know. I need a reason. Give me one, Sakura."

I stared at him. Then I knew what he was saying. He wanted someone to take over and give him limits. He wanted to hear it from someone he, I knew now, trusted. He was too proud to outwardly make the decision himself because it would be admitting he'd failed. Failed whatever it was he was living up to, trying to live up to.

Fighting a grin, I put one hand on my hip. "Uchiha Sasuke, as your physician, I order you for the sake of your health to retire from the life of a shinobi. You are not able to fulfill the requirements expected of a ninja. It's over." I paused, watching the as amusement and relief appeared in the eye that could still see. "How's that?"

He smirked before closing his eyes, his whole body visibly screaming with relief. His shoulder set sagged and he, very softly, began to laugh. He laughed so hard he put his face in his hands, leaned forward and just gave in completely to his mirth. I smiled and folded my arms over my chest, listening to the beautiful sound of Sasuke laughing.

I realized he needed someone to say it. Tell him he couldn't do it anymore. Tell him to stop. He wanted an out, wanted it desperately, but he wasn't strong enough to just stop of his own volition, so he made someone else do it for him. So he made me stop him. Asked me to stop him. And I did.

* * *

**

My daughter was quite surprised when I arrived home that evening with a new housemate. When I introduced him to her and told her who he was, she beamed, and enthusiastically shook his hand. "I've heard so much about you!" she gushed, her green eyes bright. "Wow, you're a lot cuter for an older man than I thought you'd be."

I flushed slightly and snapped my daughter's name in outrage.

She played innocent, that wily young thing. She may have grown up but she hadn't lost that spunkiness that either worked for or against her depending on the situation. "What? Truth is truth. Oh, I've got the itch to cook! Mom, take a load off, Uchiha-san…"

"Sasuke."

The girl didn't skip a beat. "Sasuke. Just explore the house to your heart's content. I'll call you both when the food's ready." She ran into the kitchen.

Sasuke glanced at me, appearing a bit overwhelmed, which I didn't blame him one little bit for. I chuckled, leading him to sit in the living room. "She's always had too much energy for her own good. Her former teammates always complained she used to run them right to death. Now that she's a teacher, she runs her students to death. At this rate, the Academy isn't going to have any new Genins graduating this year. They'll all be dead!"

Sasuke made his first remark since he entered our home. "I wonder where she gets that from."

I shrugged. "Not me. I put all that expectation on myself, not anyone else. Would you like some tea?"

"Yes."

When I returned with it, he was studying a picture. I recognized from the frame and from where it was missing which one he was holding. Nonchalantly I set the tea tray down on the coffee table and began arranging the items around. "That's my husband." I sat beside Sasuke and gave him his teacup. I took the photo from him and studied it with a little, nostalgic smile. "He used made me laugh," I murmured, unconsciously touching the face of the young groom standing beside his rain-soaked bride. "He was a bit of a fool but he was an amazing med nin. I don't think there had ever been anyone like him." I reached across and replaced it. "He died soon after our child was born," I added softly. "She never knew him."

Sasuke stared at me blankly, silently. Then, for a moment, he touched my arm, squeezed it gently, and let go. It was his way, as I came to learn, of offering comfort. I touched his hand in return.

My daughter appeared in the living room at that moment, poking just her head in. "Sorry to interrupt, but I need to ask you a question." She was speaking to Sasuke. "Would it be okay if I put tomato sauce on your spaghetti? It's all we have," she added with an apologetic wince. "Sorry."

Sasuke gave her a small smile. "I like tomatoes."

"Stellar." She beamed and her head disappeared into the kitchen again.

* * *

**

The simple joy of having Sasuke back in our lives wasn't without its inevitable hitches. No matter how many times I told him he was a part of the family, not a roommate paying rent, he insisted on it. It took me a while to finally get the point across that he was hurting my feelings by offering me money. But he found other ways to pay me back. He couldn't accept me playing breadwinner solo, so he joined the police force. They were delighted to have him. Sasuke was amazed the police station still bore the Uchiha fan on the outside. The chief in turn was surprised that Sasuke bothered to ask why it still did. "Your family founded it, didn't they?" he replied, eyebrows jumping up. "My dad knew your father, actually. I met him a few times when I was a kid myself. If you want to, you can talk to my father. Has he got stories to tell!"

Since I was out on far more missions than my daughter or Sasuke, I wasn't home most of the time, but I discovered another way Sasuke was earning his keep. The house was always clean and he had hot tea ready for me on the nights I came home late from the hospital. He rarely spoke to either my daughter or myself but it wasn't because he didn't have anything to say.

"I like listening to you talk," he admitted from where he was sitting on the porch. He'd gotten a haircut that day, which shaved off years from his appearance.

"Oh?" I teased, hanging up the laundry on the line. "I thought I was annoying you."

"You are." But his eyes had fixed on mine unwaveringly. I felt an uncharacteristic heat in my face and I quickly turned around to hide it.

* * *

**

My daughter and I were training together one day, as we usually did, when she made a remark that made me nearly made me slip off the branch I was on.

"I think he's in love with you."

I stabbed a kunai in the bark to keep from falling and arched an eyebrow at my wayward prodigy. "Who?"

She gave me an 'you oughta know' look. "Sasuke."

"Don't be ridiculous."

"Me? Come on, I know you carried a torch for him once. I read your old diaries."

"You what?" I almost sputtered but I didn't because adults don't sputter. "What gives you the right to go through my private things?"

"What gave you the right to go through mine?" she shot back.

"I'm your mother."

"Right." She waved that away. "Anyway, I've been watching you both. You guys may be old but all the classic signs are there. He watches you when you walk around the house. When you guys have any kind of social interaction with each other, I swear I could cut the tension with a kunai. I mean, do you think he fixes your tea every night just for kicks? I've even caught him cleaning your weapons for you the nights before your missions!"

I frowned. "I thought that it was you."

She nodded. "I usually clean your stuff but he's since taken over doing that, I haven't bothered. I'm actually glad he has, it gives me more time to grade homework." She made her way to land on the branch I was on and crouched beside me. "I've seen the way you look at him too," she continued, her voice lowered. "Even Naruto's noticed, and that guy doesn't notice much. Of course, it's because he's probably known it all along." My daughter was a cheeky young woman… I was so glad I loved her so much because it took the heart of a saint to deal with her sometimes.

"You're mistaken."

"No, just observant." She flipped a lock of her pink hair over her shoulder, assured in her 'expert' opinion and 'superior' expertise. "Look, I'm not confronting you with this because I disapprove. Just the opposite, actually." Her expression softened and she touched my shoulder. "I really think you ought to give it another try."

I couldn't look at her. "It's been too long," I murmured. "We're so different now."

"You were so different before too. As I see it, nothing's changed, besides the number of gray hairs that have appeared. HEY! It was a joke!" I eased off, removing my kunai from her throat, though she was laughing. "Besides, didn't you once used to tell me love is love? I know you, Mom, once you love someone you always love them."

I gave her a warning glare. "Exactly how long have you been reading my diaries?"

"I only read it up to your teen years, I swear."

I flipped my kunai into a position for use. "For that, I'm kicking up this spar a notch. You have twenty seconds to get as far away from me as you can."

My daughter laughed but heeded my warning.

But what she said resonated inside of me for the rest of the day. I had always carried my memories and thoughts of Sasuke with affection, even in those moments in the past where we had stood before one another as enemies. I had almost hated him then – for breaking my heart, Naruto's heart, Kakashi's heart. I hurt for all the pain he'd had to endure, and resented him for the pain he felt he had to cause, for what he himself had been unable to reconcile with in his own heart.

When I brought him home with him, I had never thought to rekindle anything but friendship with him. I had always wanted that, even back when I had been an ignorant love struck child. Simply to be acknowledged as one of those he numbered among his precious people… to me that would have been enough. And now I had that, and I had him home. Naruto was happier than I'd seen him for years. Watching them spar recreationally and joke afterwards was beautiful, and sad, because I know if Kakashi had lived longer he would have loved to see us like this again.

"I always wanted to share this with him," Naruto told me, as he and I watched Sasuke have a conversation with Naruto's wife, who was giving him a verbal lesson on the finer points of her clan's techniques. Both of his adult sons were standing together at the edge of the training field, occasionally wrestling with each other when the older one sought to prove a point to the younger. "Anything I wanted to achieve, I wanted him to have too, and if he couldn't have it, I wanted to share it with him." He sighed and gave me a sad smile. "I wish I could make him see what he's meant to me."

"You have, Naruto," I reassured him. "I don't think he'll ever tell you in words but I think he knows."

"Yeah. I don't think I'll be able to know him completely, and I don't think I'm supposed to. We talk for hours and… he thinks so differently about things, Sakura, he sees the world in this darkness I don't see. But then…" Naruto's confusion faded to contentment. "Then he smiles and says 'If someone like you is still alive, you've got to be doing something right.'"

"Sasuke said that?"

"Eh, not in so many words. He called me living proof of the Butterfly Effect because, as he said, 'Somebody's got to be paying for your good luck somewhere. You do a good deed and something drops dead on the other side of the planet.'"

I don't think I laughed so hard in all of my life.

So to imagine anything beyond gaining importance in Sasuke's life, to me, was ridiculous. My daughter had to be wrong… even though, girlishly, childishly, I wanted her to be right. It was too late to start anything now, I argued with myself. I had finally gotten Sasuke's acknowledgement and friendship… he probably would meet any overture from me as a ridiculous throwback from the past he wanted to forget. So I put it from my mind, again, and continued with my work. This was how things were going to stay, and that's how I wanted it. Or so I thought.

* * *

**

I arrived home one night tired and content. The second I stepped across the threshold and closed the door, I felt all of the day's tension bleed from me. A bliss-filled smile curled across my face.

Home. I was home.

Barefoot, I padded through the house, intending to hit the hay and concern myself with the matters of bath and food for the next day. I realized the back door was opened and moved toward it to close it, when I saw through the sliver, that Sasuke was sitting out on the back porch. I stepped out quietly and observed his back for several minutes.

He spoke. "You're late."

I moved to sit beside him. "No more than I usually am."

Neither one of us said anything more after that. We watched the stars, silently appreciating the bright moon above. The flowers from the garden perfumed the air with its sweet, heavy scent. I inhaled slowly, loving the smell. It was heady and made me feel good and warm all over.

I felt something brush against my hand. I glanced down and saw that Sasuke's hand had brushed against mine as he shifted his position slightly. It had not been deliberate, and he didn't seem to notice. Boldly, I gently slid my hand over the top of his, letting my fingers caress his. When I finally curled my hand around his, I was a little surprised when he let his own fingers curl around mine.

Gradually we separated and went our own ways to bed. But that was not the last time we would find ourselves alone together… and it was not the last time our fingers would touch.

From that moment onward, Sasuke began to open up a bit more around me. He no longer needed me to solicit a touch between us, or at least, let me end our contact without letting his hand linger on my hand, my arm, or my shoulder. Some days, when the hospital would become too much, and I simply needed the warmth of his body to lean against, he let me.

Then, finally, one night he held me a little longer and wasn't so eager to let go. He touched my face and tilted my chin up to his. I stared up into his eyes, wondering why he wasn't just putting both of us out of our miseries already. And then he did.

He had a wonderful mouth. Where he had learned to kiss like that, I didn't care to know, and maybe I was glad I hadn't had to experience his amateur beginnings. I wouldn't have traded this for anything. After a minute, he became restless, his hands wandering, searching. He was doing a good job of waking up parts of me that had been too long neglected over the years. I was surprised how what I had thought was a doused fire within me was roaring back to life.

"Sakura," Sasuke spoke into my neck, "if you don't want this, I'll stop."

"Mmm." I loved the way his hands were moving under my shirt, massaging, inducing a drug-like sensation over my mind. Then suddenly he stopped. I opened my eyes and looked into his face, which was hovering close to mine. He looked withdrawn. "I've regretted not seeing you for what you are, for what you were. I've forfeited the right to touch you." He was ashamed of his feelings for me.

"Sasuke-kun, shut up." I told him gently, kissing his mouth between each sentence. I firmly pressed our hips together and wrapped my arms around his neck. "Make love to me," I murmured into his ear, mouthing it.

And he did. Oh how he did. We rediscovered and reawakened our physical longings with one another that night. It had been a long time for both of us, so we were somewhat restrained at first. Sasuke was an attentive lover, and generous as hell. Happily, I'm proud to say I was even a little sore afterward. There were just some things I didn't do every day – however thanks to my first night with Sasuke, I knew I would be doing this a lot more often.

"I think we should move our beds to the same room," he suggested after two weeks.

"So I can't hide from you? I don't think so."

"Why would you hide from me? How long has it been since you've screamed like that?"

"Oh god, you're disgusting." I put both hands over my ears, biting back bright peals of laughter. "I need to sleep sometime, and you wear me out."

"Don't pull that 'old lady' card, Sakura. You have the body and the energy of a woman ten years younger."

"Oh?" I raised my eyebrows. "How would you know?"

Sasuke's mouth became a grim line. I knew I wasn't going to get an answer. Not that I wanted one. Or cared. I knew then, as I know now, that I was going to be the last woman to occupy Sasuke's bed. He gave what was left of himself to me, the last thing he felt was of any use to both of us. I loved him with everything I had, with everything I promised, and he returned it by letting me. He never told me with words that he loved me but in his touches, in the way he regarded me, and in his presence, I knew that he did.

"I should have given you this years ago," he told me once, as we lay together in our bed, his arms around me.

"You weren't ready years ago," I told him, smoothing his hair back from his brow. "If it meant choosing between the you I love now for the you who couldn't see me then, I'd take the man you are now over that foolish boy again and again."

Sasuke kissed my ear and tucked his head between my shoulder and my neck. "You're so annoying," he breathed.

In the darkness, I smiled. I knew he wouldn't have wanted me any other way.


	2. From the Memoirs of Haruno Sakura II

**Author's Note: **_This fic was never supposed to have a second act. I think it functions perfectly on its own as a single story. But I still had a few ideas up in that old brain of mine and they wanted to be given life... and finally I just gave in. I leave it entirely up to the reader whether or not they want this to be what happened next. As usual, all original characters do not have names._

* * *

**From the memoirs of Haruno Sakura II**

There should not be anything left to say at this point. Conventional opinion seems to demand you're supposed to think your life is half over at forty. It's like there's a stigma attached to the age or something. You're supposed to think you're done starting over because what good is a new beginning to you now when you're a quarter of the way through your lifespan?

You're told this like you're already one foot in the grave. But I know better. The truth is, and this probably won't surprise you: you are only as old as you believe and you are only as old as you feel. I just have to think about the energetic older shinobi I encounter daily who still go out on missions at sixty-five even though they 'should' have long retired by now. One particularly obstinate old kunoichi put it quite memorably:

"I can still walk, jump, run, see, hear, and I still have my wits! Maybe this old body isn't what it was several decades ago, but it still works!"

I took her message to heart. How could I not? I remembered fighting alongside Chiyo as a sixteen year old Chuunin who thought being a ninja was a career best left for the young. Then there was the Fourth Great Ninja war that completely wiped out the last vestiges of any ageist beliefs I might have still held. Hell, I'm living proof of it: Of the three people I lived with, I was the only active ninja in my household. My daughter's old back injury prevented her from going on missions. No amount of surgeries or healings could restore her former mobility to her, and after a while, she resolved she would not let it get her down and became a teacher at the Ninja Academy. She could hold her own in an emergency but regular duty was out for her... and she was only in her twenties.

The other member of my household had retired from the shinobi life for health related reasons as well, voluntarily, and under my orders. Incredibly he was content with that. It gave him the chance to pursue something he had once wanted to be as a child until fate cruelly reassigned his destiny and led him far astray from his own hopes and dreams. I'd never imagined I would see the day Uchiha Sasuke give up being a ninja so easily, with such passivity, except he did it with a grace most ambitious men in his position wouldn't have been capable of.

Personally, I just thought he wanted to wear that police uniform. He looked damn good in it, I tell you. Once, my daughter and I were in the kitchen having breakfast, and when he walked in, she whistled appreciatively. She meant only to tease, but he threw a pot holder at her, and stalked off with his coffee thermos, the sounds of her laughter following him to the door.

"Good luck Dad!" she called out after him gaily, before turning round in her seat, freezing under my wide-eyed look of astonishment. She had _never_ called him that before. "What? You two got hitched, right? So technically he's my stepfather." She paused thoughtfully, and then added, "I still hate you for choosing to elope like that, by the way."

I smirked and lifted my tea to my lips. Trust her to sidestep sentimentality with fighting words. "You're not the only one who feels that way," I opined dryly.

"Oh?" Pink eyebrows arose interestedly.

"Naruto threatened to court martial me." I sipped my tea.

"_Court martial_ you? Over _eloping_? Get out."

"It's true. Then it was five minutes of his ranting and raving about how we could do this to him. Good lord, you'd have thought it was _his_ wedding." We shared a chuckle. "No. Sasuke didn't think we merited a big to-do on account of how old we were. I personally told him I thought he was full of crap when the retirement community throws these huge bashes when one hundred and ten year old Sumi marries ninety-five year old Yukio, but what do _I_ know?"

"You know I could take that ring back!" A sudden, loud shout came from somewhere near the front door just out of sight. "I still have the receipt!"

My daughter and I ducked our heads guiltily, shooting each other surprised looks.

"Did you know he was still here?" I hissed.

"No!" she hissed back.

I calmly set my tea cup down in its saucer and folded my hands atop the table. "Forget something?" I called out sweetly, winking at my daughter, who covered her mouth with her napkin to cover her giggles.

Sasuke poked his head into the kitchen, fixing a very potent glare upon me out of his one good eye. "If you knew you were going to be that bitter over it, you should have said something three months ago, woman."

"Woman? Woman?!" That girl was going to bust a gut if she didn't get a hold on her laughter.

Sasuke tapped the back of her head. Meekly she looked back at him with a weak smile. "Hi?"

"Shouldn't you be somewhere, teaching something?"

My child seized the escape offer and made wind with it, feigning an exclamation over the time, a quick peck on my cheek, and a flurry of movement until the kitchen was bereft of her presence and mercifully silent. Sasuke glared after her murderously the whole way, seemingly ready to make good on the unspoken threat, before a smirk quickly followed when he was sure she wasn't coming back. A smirk he turned on me.

Oh no. I pushed back my chair. "You need to be somewhere too," I told him, the corners of my mouth yanking up as he entered the kitchen and positioned himself on the other side of the table. I didn't miss the way he was evaluating the situation and exactly how many obstacles were in his path.

I threw a few out there. "Now you just put that uniform on, Sasuke-kun." The infuriating smirk didn't leave his face. I moseyed my way toward a side door and gasped when he was suddenly there, blocking me from escaping. "You have to work!" I protested.

"Yes, I do," he murmured deviously into the shell of my ear, "however, you're a distraction and you weren't exactly accommodating last night. You promised me."

I had, hadn't I? My "In the morning" excuses had finally caught up with me and my new husband of only three months was keenly taking advantage of said fact. Maybe it was demeaning the way I let him dictate our love life, but when you're me and haven't been with another man for over two decades, you want to make up for lost time as much as possible. I don't know what Sasuke's reasons were for his insatiability, except I suspect he hadn't had much in the way of sexy fun times either wandering around the countryside as a young man.

I liked to pretend he had been waiting for me.

* * *

What I never told anyone, not even Ino, was Sasuke's and mine's eloping wasn't completely the stealth maneuver we made it out to be. We didn't do it to be selfish, and the reason Sasuke felt he had to give it that we were 'too old' for it to be a big deal, was only half the truth.

Our relationship had always been atypical. It was a conversation of silences and wordless actions, as true now as it had been when we were just children on a Genin team that was a lot better at falling apart spectacularly than pulling itself together. How many women can claim the love of their life tried to slit their throat once? The memory still chilled me, and there were times after dreaming about it, I absently ran my fingers over my throat the next day. But I could not, would not, put that guilt trip on him, for I would then need to do it to myself as well. It was a question that plagued my mind for many years until my first marriage: Would he have struck out at me had I not chosen to stab him in the back? I knew better now. We were beyond the mistakes that had guided the actions of our younger selves. The folly of youth was merely that and nothing more, no matter how harsh and unforgiving the past had been, it was still that: the past. If it were possible, I loved him more than I had when I first met him, and I felt that said enough about the bloody past. Enough to let it go.

So the truth was our choice to elope was a mutual one. I already had had one big wedding I realized I just wasn't up for another. Sasuke hated crowds, attention, and basically anything that meant he had to socialize. Neither one of us had living parents or siblings so out went disappointing family… unless you counted my daughter, who was too thrilled with the romantic aspect of our eloping to really be upset about it. Sasuke confided to me he still had a few enemies out there in the world who'd love nothing more than to screw his life up if they heard about an impending marriage and he didn't want to give them an excuse to attack a bunch of innocent people.

"Innocent people?" I'd repeated, puzzled. "I thought you didn't care about the other villagers."

"I don't." Then he just looked at me, like he expected me to understand what he really meant. And of course I did. So I smiled and told him, "You know that's why I love you, right?"

He shook his head. "I still don't understand how you do that. You scare me sometimes."

I winked at him and he blushed like a little boy. Oh yeah, I could make him do that. The awkward, unsure girl he had known had grown into this graceful, confident woman, and there were times he didn't know how to deal with me. I enjoyed surprising him about as much as he probably did surprising me. So I took his occasional utterances of my annoying him as his way of expressing affection.

That and the smirk…The smirk always gave him away. You'd think I'd know better by now. He'd even smirked before proposing, the bastard. Even that was a low-key affair. He just put the little box on the coffee table between us one day, opened it, turned it around, and waited quietly for my reaction.

I stared at it for several seconds, comprehending the enormity of it all, before plucking out the ring – a small, gold-etched, wedding band – and putting it on my finger. I held my hand out, liked the way it looked on my hand, and the way it fit, before smiling at him. I was afraid to speak because I feared actual butterflies would burst from my mouth. Or I would start screaming like a teenager and dancing around like a moron. Instead I got myself under control, reached out to him, and kissed him on the mouth, drawing back after to look him in the eyes.

"Yes."

There was no denying the relief in his formerly shuttered expression he had been wearing up until that point. It was his last hurtle to make in being with me. I wouldn't have ever minded not being officially married, because being with Sasuke in any capacity was acceptable to me. But the fact _he_ wanted to made it mean all the more.

* * *

For a short time after my second marriage, I thought the course of my life didn't have many more turns to go. I'd laughed, cried, screamed and fought with the best –and worst - of them. I'd fought in a war. I'd loved and lost and loved again. I'd known several great men in my life. I had my family. I had my work. I had my home. I had everything. All that was left as far as I saw it was to gradually wind down, slip blissfully into old age, a hot cup of tea in my hand, and Sasuke's face to wake up to every morning for the remainder. It didn't take much to make me happy, and I already felt I was tempting fate a little too much by being as contented as I was.

So it made sense it took the silent, unissued challenge, and decided to shake things up some more because, what the hell, I could handle it, right?

It started with the murder of a family and ended with an unexpected gift. None of these were connected to one another unless you counted my being inadvertently placed smack dab in a middle of them "connected."

The first was mostly Sasuke's story to tell, one he declined, rather giving me an oral recollection of those events when I asked him about them. I'll do my best to recount what he told me here, several of the details which he couldn't – or wouldn't - disclose until much later, after the investigation was officially closed.

At the time of this writing, Sasuke was a detective in the homicide sector that dealt with crimes at the civilian level. With his past shinobi experience, he could have made captain easily, but he detested the idle nature of the position, preferring to work in the field. This stance mildly bothered his superiors, who felt his leadership qualities were being wasted, and won him admiration from the junior officers and deputies he worked with. Well, almost. He refused to work with a partner and chose to work most of his investigations solo.

The day he left after having that morning canoodle with me began ordinarily enough. Close to the end of his shift, he received a call from an officer about a woman who lived next to a clan compound about hearing strange, disturbing noises coming from within its walls. She'd finally called the police when she'd heard an agonized scream.

By the time Sasuke arrived at the scene, he froze at the entrance to the compound when he saw that it was one of Konoha's more well-known, powerful clans, one he remembered having known a few members of growing up as a kid back at the Ninja Academy. They had a reputation of being as arrogant as the Uchiha and specialized in some of the world's most deadly jutsus.

Officers were everywhere, cordoning off the area with tape, writing things down, opening doors to homes and entering them, calling out names, while others marked doors with numbers. Sasuke numbly made his way down a center row of elegant homes, feeling the unwelcome horror of déjà vu wash over him. The place was eerily still, the windows of each home were dark, and there wasn't a soul in sight who wasn't a police officer.

"What happened here?" he asked a deputy he recognized charge out from out of the open homes to greet him breathlessly.

The man shook his head, the grimness in his expression causing the pit of Sasuke's stomach to churn.

"Outside from the obvious fact they're all dead, we don't know. Near as we can tell, they were all murdered sometime in the early morning hours, maybe two hours after sun up."

"How many victims?"

"We're still searching but the body count so far has been the clan head, his family, seven women, seven men, ten children between the ages of eight months to thirteen years, just…" The deputy stopped, blinked several times, and exhaled quietly. "Whoever did this knew _exactly_ what he or she was doing. Quick and quiet."

Quick and quiet: exactly like a high-level ninja, and from the sound of it, an especially lethal one. "The woman who heard the scream: What did you get out of her?"

"She couldn't tell us much more than that. She didn't see anybody leave the compound and she hadn't noticed anything out of the ordinary prior." He led Sasuke to a large home, the door gaping slightly ajar. He pushed it open slowly. "This is where we think it started. The clan head's home. Watch your step."

Sasuke saw why as he passed over the threshold. A girl of about ten or eleven was lying just in front of the entrance, one hand outstretched to the door, a blood trail leading down the surface of the door. The nature of the blood drips indicated she probably had just managed to reach the door before whoever had been chasing her had caught up to her. There was wide pool of blood under her head, and when Sasuke knelt to examine her, he saw the deep gash in her throat.

The kitchen was worse. A gently plump middle aged woman, presumably the girl's mother, lay on the floor by the kitchen sink, which was filled with water and suds. Her rolled up sleeves, and still damp arms, indicated she'd been washing dishes when she'd been attacked. A broken plate lay beside her. Her throat too had been slashed.

Sasuke forced himself to tear his eyes off the deceased woman to continue on through the rest of the home, shadowing the officer leading him. And to think, he thought as he listened to the floorboards creak under his feet, every home in the compound contained this horror show.

The clan head, a middle aged man who was as plump and roly-poly looking as his wife, was found in his study slumped over his desk filled with open scrolls and other documents. Dots of crimson spatter covered part of one wall and spotted across the surface of the desk.

The next room across from the study contained a teenage boy lying against the doors of his closet. A lump formed in Sasuke's throat when his eyes skipped over the contents of the young man's room. From the collection of kunai, shuriken, and caches of exploding tags, and other arsenal, and most tellingly, the neatly folded Konoha forehead protector on the windowsill beside the photograph of the boy he had taken with his team, there was no mistaking it.

The boy had been a Genin.

Right then and there, Sasuke wanted to walk right out of that home and never come back, he was so close to losing it. But he couldn't. This was his crime scene, he had been called to deal with it, and he would see it through. The deputy was keeping his cool; so could he.

Sasuke paused in front of the dead boy, staring at the odd way his body laid against the closet doors. "Deputy," he said at length, steadily, "what does that look like to you?" He pointed to the blood spatter pattern splashed across the width of the wooden folding doors.

The man stood beside him, studying the body and then the door, before slowly nodding, seeing the same thing Sasuke did. "His back was braced against the doors when he was killed. You can see the shape of his fingers in the blood smears."

Sasuke frowned, kneeling by the body, and examining the fatal wounds more closely. "Look at this: He was being stabbed repeatedly, but he wouldn't move, not until he was dead. Now why would he do that? Just stand there and let himself be stabbed to death?"

The other man's gaze rose and met with Sasuke's narrowed, knowing stare. Together they carefully moved the body to the side, before Sasuke pulled one of the closet doors open. He glimpsed movement in the back behind the wardrobe and pushed the clothes out of the way.

A small body lunged out at him, both tiny hands wrapped around a kunai, yelling. Surprised by the sudden violence, Sasuke moved back instantly, hands out. "Whoa! Stop, _stop_!"

At the second 'stop' the small body, a very small boy, froze abruptly, cornflower blue eyes wide, his face tear streaked, the kunai in his hands trembling, before he backpedalled rapidly until he hit the corner of the closet. Snot ran from his nose as sobs escaped in soft frightened mewls between his lips. Thick locks of his short, tousled, black hair framed a pale, round face that had not yet quite lost its baby fat. He peered up at the policemen staring back at him with just as much bewilderment and apprehension.

At length, Sasuke offered his empty hands out to the child calmly. "It's okay, we're the police," he spoke quietly, more gently to the boy than he'd ever spoken to anyone in his life. "You're safe now."

_Although you're never going to be okay again,_ was the rest of what whispered in the back of his mind.

The boy stared at him, his frantic breathing still hard, before he caught something out of the corner of his eye. Sasuke turned his head and saw what the child was looking at. He almost cursed. They should have moved the body out of the boy's sight.

The reaction was immediate and horrible. _"Oniisan!"_ the boy began to scream, trying to lunge forward again, past Sasuke, the tears flowing afresh, stopped only by Sasuke catching him and picking him up, ignoring the kunai that slipped from the child's loosened grip as he reached around Sasuke, arms outstretched behind him. _"Oniisan!"_ the boy kept wailing, even as Sasuke swiftly exited the room, refusing to let the boy's screams and struggles prevent him from doing the only thing he could do: _Get him out of there_.

Nobody had been there to stop him from seeing the dead bodies of his loved ones and searing them into his memories for the rest of his life. He'd be damned if he let it happen to this boy.

* * *

In the end, out of the twenty-six dead discovered, the youngest child of the clan head was the only survivor, thanks to his older brother using his own body as a shield to keep him from being discovered after shoving him into his closet. In death, his body trapped him inside the small space, preventing him from seeing, and being discovered, by the killers, and possibly, saving his life because of that. Unfortunately it also meant he hadn't seen who'd wiped out his family.

It was the worst act of carnage in Konoha since the end of the Fourth Ninja War – and the most shocking, because nobody could believe a massacre of that scale could happen again, especially after what happened with the Uchiha. Needless to say, Naruto was out for blood, incensed such a horrific tragedy had happened again under _his_ watch. In a rare public announcement, he authorized whoever had done this atrocity to be engaged with extreme prejudice when found.

"Notice I said 'when' and not 'if.' I do not want any of you to hold back," he told his Council of trusted clan heads and fellow shinobi, with the steely eyed resolve that had earned him his position. "I want this bastard or bastards _caught_. You know how I feel about these sorts of things and I will not tolerate such a needless, _senseless_ waste of life."

The furor the murders stirred up was massive so it was no kind of bolt from the blue the little boy, the true victim, almost got lost in its wake. With no one alive to aver him, he spent his following days in the hospital, silent, scared and alone. Nobody wanted to take the child in, in spite of the generous outpouring of sympathy for his plight. Whoever had wiped his family out might discover the job had been left unfinished and no one wanted to become a target while the killer or killers were still at large.

Well, _almost_ no one.

So that was how one afternoon I arrived home from a mission and found a five year old boy curled up asleep on the couch, a blanket tucked around his little body, with one of his thumbs jammed in his mouth. I smiled involuntarily at the sight, moved by the sweet picture of innocence, before I realized there was a little boy who normally didn't live here napping in my living room. I _did_ know who he was, even if _certain_ people hadn't thought to be bothered with telling me about what was going on. Sasuke was going to get an earful about this. Right now, I just wanted out of this uncomfortable, sweaty, dirty ANBU uniform. I gently set my weapons and equipment down, and carefully began removing the rest of my gear, sitting down on an armchair to take off my arm and leg guards, undoing the ties lace by lace.

Somewhere in my muted disarmament, the boy woke, and I didn't notice until I saw two bright blue eyes watching me curiously. I smiled at him readily and winked, slipping off one sandal and then the other. "Hi," I said friendly and open, like I greeted unexpected guests in my house all the time.

He dragged the back of a small hand across his face sleepily and sat up more fully, the blanket falling, and pooling around his little body. "Hi," he replied perfunctorily, still watching me steadily, studying my profile. "Who're you?" he asked next.

"I'm Sakura. I live here."

"Oh. I live here too. I guess." He shrugged. "That's what Sasuke-san told me."

I raised my eyebrows but didn't comment further. "He did, did he? And where is Sasuke-san?"

"In the bathroom, he said you would be home too, so don't be surprised if a pretty lady comes in the room, he said." He gave me a timid smile, a modest blush coloring his cheeks. "I like your hair," he offered shyly.

There truly was nothing better, I thought then, than when an adorable little boy tells a woman my age she's pretty. I gave him another smile that had everything to do with how pleased I was and the child beamed back, happy he'd said the right thing.

However, when I pushed back the shower curtain in a steaming hot bathroom, the expression my face was wearing was somber.

My husband stared back at me from under the spray, one dark eyebrow raised, only mildly put off by my method of confrontation. One hand that was firmly planted on my hip one way and the tilt of my head the other told him the rest of the story.

"Were you just never going to discuss it with me or were you hoping for it to be a surprise?"

Sasuke nonchalantly put the soap down and adjusted the showerhead, deciding to blithely ignore me by sticking his head under the garrulous torrent of water. Tsking, I reached over to turn it off, when he grabbed my wrist securely mid-reach.

"Oh, so you _will_ be discussing it with me. I see, nice and considerate of you."

Sasuke cracked one eye open (his good one) that wasn't closed in bliss. "Is the door locked?" he asked.

"Yes." I was already divesting my clothes and unpinning the cascade of pink hair twisted into a knot behind my head. Sasuke held my hand, steadying me as I stepped over the top of the tub to join him. He at once started going for his favorite destinations before I seized his hands and clasped them both steadfastly sandwiched between my breasts.

"Explanations first, sweetheart, then you will be extended full groping privileges." I glanced down briefly, adding wryly. "Well, _some_ things just can't be helped, of course."

Sasuke gave me a wonderfully thwarted look. "He doesn't have any living family and everyone thinks he's got a target painted on him." He spoke the rest through clenched teeth. "What was I supposed to do, just leave him in that damn hospital to drown in his anger and guilt?" He continued on when his question was met by silence. "I'm doing for him what no one did for me, Sakura. I kept secretly hoping someone would come along and tell me it would be okay someday but you know nobody ever did." He sounded almost like he was pleading, except Sasuke didn't do pleading, he just coldly informed you of the facts the way he saw them and you _better_ listen.

"Naruto wanted to," I murmured, touching his face, caressing it gently, my finger skipping lightly over the faded scar on his cheek. "I wanted to, so much."

"I know," he said, freeing one hand to brush my wet hair away from my face. He said it again against my lips in a chaste kiss.

"All right," I whispered finally, close to his ear, "but only because he likes my hair."

I felt rather than heard Sasuke chuckle.

* * *

The little boy's presence was both a welcome change and an entirely new set of responsibilities and challenges for the household. The place hadn't seen children in several years so it took some getting used to on all of our parts. My daughter was _thrilled _with the arrangement: she loved kids and it helped the boy was of the especially adorable, polite, well brought up variety. She threw herself into making him feel at home like it was her mission in life. It certainly helped he recognized her from the Academy and already thought she was a cool person, often opining he wished she was _his_ teacher, and demanding _why_ couldn't she be his teacher?

"You get to _live_ with me, squirt," she told him once when he complained, "you can't _get_ any better than that!"

A room was made up for him out of what I had used as a study, but I decided it worth the sacrifice since I usually wound up bringing all my book work into my bedroom with me instead (much to my husband's consternation). The boy wasn't very thrilled with this in the beginning having spent his nights up until the room was finished sleeping on my daughter's bedroom floor. For the first few weeks it wasn't unusual to find him camped out in front of her closed bedroom door with a pillow and a blanket. On nights she disappeared to spend time with friends or to tutor a student after school, he slept in front of Sasuke and mine's bedroom. When he did that, Sasuke wasn't as accommodating as us women folk: he didn't let him stay there all night. He waited till the boy was asleep before gathering him up and plopping him back in his _own_ bed, inside his _own_ room.

At last, Sasuke sat down with the boy and explained to him he had to be strong, and sleeping alone was just the first step forward.

"But… But I have nightmares!" the boy whispered tearfully, genuinely alarmed.

"I know you do," Sasuke replied, gently brushing the child's cheek with the back of his knuckles. "And you can always tell me about them. You can tell her about them too," he pointed at me, and I smiled back at the boy's questioning stare. "We're here to protect you until you can do it yourself."

The boy nodded solemnly. He didn't look entirely convinced. "I _want_ my parents," he blurted out softly, stubbornly. "I _want_ my brother and my sister." His little face crumpled and he pressed it against Sasuke's shoulder and began to cry. Sasuke obliged and held the boy, letting the kid hold onto him as tightly as he wanted to.

Over the child's shoulder, I saw how shuttered Sasuke's own expression was, how much strength he was exerting to hold his own emotions in. He later told me he never knew what it was like to be strong for someone else until he met this boy. He never imagined he had it in him to face a mirror image of the very thing that had broken him. He had only to look into this child's eyes and realize it was as simple and complicated as just being there. He couldn't tell the boy why his family was dead or why they were never coming back but _he could be there_. He could pick up the pieces.

It was a couple of months later I was sitting on my front porch, watching my daughter on the front lawn with the boy, who giggled and play-fought with her, occasionally stopping so she could show him proper fighting stances and hand seals. I wanted to cry at the sight. It wasn't too long ago I remembered a scared boy who was afraid to sleep alone and not entirely at ease accepting love and care from a woman who wasn't his mother and from a man who wasn't his father. He'd hidden in closets when people came over to visit and glared at Naruto when the Hokage tried to make him smile. Sometimes he forgot his parents were gone and asked us when they were coming back. Other times he remembered that fact with a fearsome vengeance and he refused to talk to anyone for hours or even days.

Slowly, and without doubt, he was making steps forward. He would never fully heal – I knew that too well – but he would _live_. He would be the way I was seeing him now, smiling, laughing, and looking onward, seeing the future again. Deep in my heart, I knew this was what his family would have wanted for him.

The boy jumped on my daughter's back, grabbing her in a mock choke hold, a feat that unbalanced her and caused them both to topple over in a pile, laughing. It was this sight that greeted Sasuke as he stepped out of the house to join me under the awning on the porch swing. He watched them for a long time, a small grin eventually turning the corners of his mouth up.

"Itachi and I used to do that," he said unexpectedly, as I let my head rest on his shoulder, closing my eyes as his arm wrapped around mine, his fingers absently stroking and carding strands of my hair. "We wrestled around so much, my mother used to yell at us for behaving like, she said, 'a couple of monsters.'" I laughed. "It gets better. Itachi would then very logically, and quite sensibly, explain to her _why_ we needed to act like that. I'll never forget the way she looked at him when he pulled that crap with her, like what kind of idiot did he think she was?"

"That poor woman," I turned my head and looked up into my husband's face, encouraged by this rare gift of his sharing his happier memories. "You guys get along with her pretty good?"

"She was a princess." Sasuke seemed a little sad when he said it, but the little smile was still there. "Put up with way more nonsense than anyone had any right to and she had a wicked sense of humor. I may have worshipped my brother, but to me _she_ was the one who walked on water."

"Oh, well now, how can anyone compete with _that_?" I pretended to huff jealousy. "See if I ever do you any favors again."

"As if I _ever_ asked you to," he muttered.

"As if _you_ ever said no. _Agh_!" I shrieked, startled when he grabbed me and pulled me around until I was sitting on his lap. "Sasuke-kun!" I protested, trying to sound indignant and failing because I was laughing so hard.

The boy heard my shout and came clambering excitedly up the stairs to join us on the swing next to us in what he thought was a group hug. My daughter just stood there, staring at us, shaking her head, and rolling her eyes at our antics. "You guys are worse than my old teammates," she complained.

* * *

Eventually we officially adopted the boy. When told he needed to change his name, he wasn't happy with it, however; until the investigation concluded, it wasn't safe for him to keep his old name. He frowned not liking that, yet reluctantly agreed it was better to be safe, for now, until the killer or killers were caught. We told him it would be okay to think about it for a little while, but he shook his head firmly.

"No. I've made up my mind." He looked up at Sasuke determinedly and grabbed his hand. "I want _your_ name."

Three more years would pass before the killers of the clan were brought to justice, thanks in no small part to a certain Uchiha Sasuke who never let the case die, a certain Konoha police precinct who ran down leads obsessively because it was well funded by a Council headed by a stubborn, hard-headed man named Uzumaki Naruto who swore the day he became Hokage that no one would ever get away with this shit again. And they never did.

The kid kept Sasuke's name after all, ultimately hyphenating it with his own. Like my daughter, who used it as a term of endearment to tease, he called Sasuke 'Dad' too, only for him it became a regular habit (unless he was pissed off at him). He never could quite call me 'Mom' though, which he apologized for, until I told him it didn't matter. I wasn't his mother I didn't need to be called that, because I could never be her.

"Oh no!" he'd exclaimed in horror, grabbing my hands beseechingly, almost eye to eye with me, thanks to a growth spurt at the onset of puberty that made him one _very_ tall fifteen year old boy indeed. "No! I didn't mean it like that at all! It's hard to explain," he eased down, letting my hands go. "You are a _great_ mom! It's just… hard. I don't know why. I love you." He blushed when he admitted this because teenage boys are adorable like that. "And it's not like I don't _want_ to," he ended, looking away. "Or… or don't think it."

"Sweetie." I clapped both hands robustly on the kid's shoulders and looked him dead in the eye. "You're not doing anything wrong. As long as you think it in here -" I tapped him on the chest affectionately - "I don't care what you call me to my face."

He grinned. "Thank you, Sakura."

"Any time kid, now… go train with your team, because you need to get out of my kitchen right now before I sucker punch you."

He saluted me smartly – damn _right_ he should salute me, that little Chuunin level pain in the ass – and made off quickly.

Oh yes, the kid was ninja all right, Sasuke saw to _that_ particular development very early on. He made sure the kid learned about his own clan and their specialized jutsu repertoire in addition to the one the boy had unwittingly called on for his own. The boy wasn't Uchiha by blood, and so would never wield the Sharingan, but Sasuke made sure he did the name he decided to adopt proud. And to think, once upon a time he'd sneered at anyone who _dared_ attempt to cash in on the Uchiha legacy…

Well, it definitely helped he had _quite_ the aptitude for fire – and adored Sasuke. I will always remember each and every beautiful word he told me the day he became a Jounin:

"I don't know what I would have done without you guys. There was this howling emptiness and rage in me… I wanted to scream every single day, because everything was so wrong and unfair. Can you imagine that, your whole family being dead, wondering how come you weren't dead too? I did, for a long time. It kept messing with me, like someone was standing behind me, constantly poking me in the back with a sharp knife. But every time I started teetering off the edge, you guys pulled me back. I remember once when we had a fight about it Sasuke smacked me in the head and shouted at me that my brother didn't die protecting me so I could cry about it for the rest of my life. Damn, I wanted to hate him for saying that! But he was right… and here I am, and I don't think I've ever been more grateful."

* * *

You're probably thinking the inclusion of the boy in our interesting little family was the unexpected gift, and you would be about half right. He was unexpected and very much a gift. But he wasn't the gift I was talking about. The one I'm talking about happened a few months after the adoption.

I remember the days leading up to it very clearly. I'd been feeling absolutely awful over the past several weeks, sick some days, bloated others, and nothing was fitting right anymore. I was gaining weight in all the wrong places, I wanted to cry all the time, and I careened between bouts of depression so deeply I fantasized about suicide, and happiness so great I wanted to fly through the sky.

Then there was the inexplicable horniness. I couldn't believe how badly I wanted it some days, it was downright _embarrassing_. I felt like a freak. Something had to be wrong with me, seriously wrong with me, because one day I was standing in Naruto's office, just talking with him casually following a mission report, and then I was seized with the powerful urge to jump on him. Now don't mistake me on this: I thought Naruto was a good-looking man, and, objectively, sexy. On a few occasions as teens, before we were both married, we messed around a bit. Contrary to what we expected, it didn't change our friendship; in fact, it made us sure that's what we were better off being: just friends. It was an enormous burden off our minds; no more need to wonder about the 'what ifs.'

So you could understand my concern now, feeling this, decades later, suddenly wanting to do it out of the blue like that.

Later, much to my relief upon reflection, I realized it wasn't _him_ I wanted, it was the sex, and the only sex I ever wanted to have with anyone was with Sasuke.

So for the first time since we became a couple, I was the one starting things, and starting them pretty spectacularly. In the process, I actually managed to find out some more interesting things about my husband.

When it came to seduction, Sasuke was awesome at dominating, and could sweep me along like the river wild, yet once I had _him_ flat on _his_ back, or shoved in a corner, using that fearsome strength so many enemies feared, the man was completely mine. He would show a side of himself I had no idea existed. He was very vocal and he said some incredibly nasty words I wouldn't have believed him capable of uttering in my presence. After that came the hair pulling and the passionately worded insults, and I could have sworn that look he gave me before that special moment was the same one he gave Naruto before they used to fight close to the brink of death. I was holding out on him and he didn't like it one bit.

The first time it happened, I apologized in the after math and he gave me a markedly hostile look, and said something I've never forgotten: "That was the best lay I've had in my entire life, don't you _dare_ fucking apologize to me."

Best lay. In his… _entire…_ life. _Me_.

I needed to do this kind of stuff more often.

But the symptoms of my mysterious whatever it was continued to persist. The denouement revealed itself while I was counting the days on my calendar and I noticed I'd missed my period.

_Twice_.

An intense feeling of panic washed over me. _Menopause_, I fretted, _I'm going into menopause_. I knew it was going to happen one day, as it happened to all women, and now it was finally happening to me. I wanted to cry, and at the same time, rebuke myself. Most kunoichi considered it blessed to live long enough to go through menopause. It was nothing compared to dying young. Hell, in our line of work, it was considered a milestone to be _celebrated_.

Still, I wasn't a med nin for nothing. More to the point they seemed rather off, these symptoms of mine, not exactly completely right for the onset of menopause. For a kunoichi, skipping periods wasn't an unusual occurrence. Ino once told me she'd gone on so many vigorous, intense missions she stopped having hers for four months. It could be stress. It could be something else.

It had to be something else. My chakra lines were screwed up, I wasn't able to control them as well, and there were times it was a chore just molding it. That wasn't right, that wasn't… right… Wait.

Wait. I was remembering something. Twenty years ago, this had happened once before, right before I found out…

I was afraid to perform the examination on myself. First rule of med nin training was always when in doubt, _get a second opinion_, and the second rule was, _never_ self-diagnose. The second opinion I wanted came in the form of Shizune, who had for years since our mentor's death functioned as my unofficial personal physician. I wasn't emotionally stable or clear minded enough to make any confirmations about my health on my own. It was her expertise I called on now.

"I just need to be sure I'm not just imagining things," I told her urgently. "I've exhausted all my options and I'm in a panic, and I just… I don't know what to _think_. Please set me straight."

Shizune grinned and went about her routine in the hospital examining room we'd snagged for our own for an hour. Being the head med nins of the village gave us that kind of power on short notice and one I couldn't be too ungrateful to call upon now.

She performed several standard medical tests on me. Some were accomplished with the usual instruments of the trade, others with a chakra laced hand running over my whole body and abdomen. I remained silent and antsy during every procedure, afraid to speak - terrified a single spoken word would shatter reality as I knew it.

At last, Shizune stood before me with a clipboard and my test results, reciting each and every line to me verbatim, not because she wanted to, but because I made her do it. I stared straight head, hands clasped before my face, hanging on to every word. Finally she reached the end of her recital, put down the clipboard on a table behind her, and folded her arms over her chest.

"You do know, Sakura," she teased with the beginnings of a smile, "all of this could have been confirmed with just one little device."

I shot her a frosty look. "_Maybe_, if I were about two decades younger, Shizune, then we wouldn't even be having this conversation. Don't evade. Am I?"

"What do you think?" she answered right back.

"I think I want to know what's wrong with me."

Shizune shook her head. "It's wrong only if _you_ think what's wrong with you is 'wrong.' I'm more inclined to think likewise." He face changed from its sly expression to something more somber. "If you want, I could," she said softly, "I really could…"

"No!" I protested. "No. Say it. Okay? Just… Say it."

"All right." She took a deep breath. "Sakura..."

* * *

I went home that day in a sort of numb haze, blind and deaf to everything around me. I was floating in a strange bubble of emotions, wondering which way was up, and not quite certain of the general direction of down either. In one day, my future had, again, changed in an instant. You think I'd be used to it by now. I ended up deciding my primary emotion was to be happy about this. There was no reason whatsoever to be upset. It wasn't the same as before, it _wouldn't_ be the same as before.

I would make certain of that.

By the time my mind cleared, my home was in view, and my stomach flipped over a few times. I hadn't told anyone about my stealthy doctor's visit, so I was safe waiting a little longer so I could figure it out. I knew which of them would have to be the first to know. The question was what to say… and _how_ I was going to say it.

I was greeted by the sight of my six year old adopted son playing a board game on the front patio, his attention so quietly focused on the pieces' positions he barely noticed my walking past him to enter the front door. I paused to tousle his hair affectionately, "Hey sweetie."

"Hey." He didn't look up. Sticking his tongue between his teeth, he carefully moved a piece across the board. "Playing against the game is _hard_," he complained.

"It sure is. Where's your Big Sis?"

"In the back yard still, I think. One of her teammates came over."

That caught my attention. "Really?" How unusual. Neither of those boys visited very often. "Which one, do you know?"

"Um, the one who doesn't talk when he comes over with the other man. He's kind of weird."

Oh him. I smiled. "Want to help me out in a little bit?"

He turned his face up to me. "With what?" he asked suspiciously.

"Dinner."

He made a face at me. "Do I _have_ to?" he whined predictably.

I poked the center of his forehead playfully. "You _do_ want to eat, don't you?"

"Yes," he rubbed absently at the spot I'd touched, "but…"

"Then you'll help me."

He huffed in such a long-suffering way it was all I could do not to sweep him up in a big old hug. He was such an easy child to love.

"All right," he grumped reluctantly. "Do I get to choose what we eat?" Already he's learned how to bargain and he wasn't anywhere near puberty yet.

"If we have it."

He brightened and instantly everything was once more sunshine and roses. "Okay! I'll help!" he exclaimed eagerly, his excitement telling this was a rare and unique gift in his limited world scope. "Do I get to use the stove too?" he added ardently.

Nice try, shortstop. "No, smarty-pants, _I_ get to use the stove. _You_ get to pick out the foods you want and set the table."

He became crestfallen. "Setting a table is _girl's_ work."

"Sasuke sets the table, genius."

"He's different," replied the boy, as if this were the most obvious thing in the world.

"I don't see how."

"Sa-ku-ra," he whimpered, "_please_?"

I finally laid it all down flat out. "Do it and you get to have an extra helping of dessert; if you don't, you don't get dessert period." I could bargain too, kid, and heaven help you if you get into a debate with me. "Blackmail works both ways, babe."

His response was to stick his tongue out at me. "Stow it or lose it." He stowed it, but kept the pout. I rewarded it with a wink. "Love you lots."

He sucked his lips between his teeth and reddened briefly before returning his attention to the game. I ruffled his hair again and entered our home. What a treasure.

I briefly checked the back yard, which opened up into a field bordered by woodland. I could see evidence my daughter had been out there training, but there was no one out there. I shook my head at the mess I could see from where I stood. The girl was a grown woman and had at last check been a ninja for most of her youth. Didn't she know to put her equipment away when she was done with it? I sighed. Guess it was time to do some heavy duty mothering. Dammit, I still shouldn't have to be doing this, at least _this_ part.

I headed to her room and stopped dead when I finally noticed the collection of shoes by the door. There was a pair that didn't belong to Sasuke, my daughter, the boy, or myself.

A man's shoes.

Then I caught the faintest trace of elevated chakra… two of them. I followed the signature and it led me to the closed door of my daughter's room. I raised my hand to grasp the knob when I heard a noise that anyone who has ever done it would know it for what it was. I snatched my hand back as if scalded and slapped it over my mouth.

After recovering from the initial shock, I fought back a giggle, smiled, shook my head, and very smartly rapped my knuckles on the door. I had to throttle back a howl of laughter when I heard a man shout: "SHIT!" coupled almost simultaneously with my daughter shouting, with some effort: "Hold on, I'm coming – _put some pants on_!"

I folded my arms and patiently waited out the curses, the stumbling, until the door was opened a crack and my daughter stood there, bare legged, hair mussed, and that lazy, relaxed look of one who's had herself a very good time. "Yeah, what?" she said, leaning against the frame way too casually. "You're home early."

"And a good afternoon to you too," I began, giving her a very deliberate once-over. "Since when did you start wearing giant men's shirts?"

She blushed. "I don't see how that's any of your business."

"I think it's my business to know what goes on under my roof."

"_Our_ roof."

"Now you're just arguing semantics." I perused her through narrow eyes. "Now, are you going to hide this one from me too, or do I still not merit that level of consideration from you?"

My daughter began to open her mouth when the door was yanked out of her hand and pushed open further. "We're not hiding," said her male teammate, handsome in just pants, and gorgeously bare-chested, sliding my daughter a look that was loaded with meaning. "After being welcome in your home for so many years, I wouldn't dare disrespect you like that."

I smiled, pleasantly caught off guard. "I think those are the most words you have ever said to me."

Now _he_ was blushing. "Oh… um, sorry."

I laughed. This was an unexpected development, but definitely not an unwelcome one. "Get dressed, both of you. Staying for dinner?" I asked him, ignoring my daughter's understandably shell-shocked expression.

He glanced at my daughter for permission and she kind of gave him a helpless gesture, like, what did he expect her to say? I had all the power here. He shrugged. "If you want."

"I'll take that as a yes."

* * *

"So," I said later on to my daughter when we were alone, watching while she cleaned up her equipment outside. "When did this happen?"

"The sex or us being together?" she asked right back, still a little embarrassed about before.

"Both."

My daughter set down a sack of kunai and scratched the back of her neck. "It's kind of a long story. He's liked me since before I can remember, ever since we were put on the same team when we were kids. Back then he kept his feelings to himself, because, well, you know why."

I did, of course. I nodded and gestured, prompting she continue.

"After _he_ was gone, well, he gave me space, and then he told me how he felt. I… I was shocked. I had no idea, not in the least. It wasn't like he's ever obvious about anything, you know?" I nodded. "You know him he's not exactly the kind of guy you bring home. He was always overly critical of me and everything I did. In his eyes, I was the fuck up on the team, and he loved proving that every chance he got. He and my other teammate used to get into fights about the way he talked to me." My daughter smiled. "So you can see why I was so taken aback. I didn't believe him at first and tried to burn his ears off about if that was true, why was he such an asshole to me."

"And what did he say?" I asked when she didn't immediately go on.

"He said it was because I was so gone over that traitor, he couldn't stand it. But he couldn't bring himself to hurt me like that by coming between us so he kept his mouth shut about it. He knew what it was like to be in love because he was in love with me. He wouldn't rob me of that joy." She looked a little dreamy. "So I decided to give him a chance to win me over. It's taken a few years, because we took it slowly. So the sex is recent." She cupped her hand to the side of her mouth and whispered: "And it's _awesome_."

I rolled my eyes. The price to pay for being this close, I guess! "As if I wouldn't know anything about that," I said dryly.

My daughter grimaced. "I don't like to think about it. You're my mom, that's just gross." She gathered up the last of her equipment and headed into the house. "Dad's home," she said absently, over her shoulder, indicating with her chin behind me.

My heart leapt into my throat but I made myself calmly turn and greet my husband. He had his hands in his pockets and was approaching the home at his usual pace. It amazed me even after all these years, he still didn't change the haughty manner in which he walked, all detached and stoic from the world, projecting that cool allure that had so attracted me to him in the first place. But the difference was now when he lifted his gaze to meet mine, a smile followed, and he hugged me back when I embraced him. I gave him a wifely peck on the mouth and pressed my forehead against his.

"Hey."

"Hey."

I leaned back, searching his face for stress, and finding only the usual contentment he wore so easily nowadays. I sighed when he kissed me on the forehead and parted from me, keeping our hands laced together between us. He studied my face, and tilted his head to the side. "You all right?" he asked softly.

I nodded, and then for no reason at all, I felt a lump form in my throat, and my pulse began racing. "I went to the doctor today," I blurted, internally smacking myself for bringing it up like that. You never delivered good news disguised as implied bad news. But I was too cowardly to do a direct approach.

Sasuke didn't react or move. The only visible change was the way he looked at me; there was a guardedness to his gaze. He was bracing for bad news and his whole body became very still beneath my hands.

I took a deep breath and kept rock steady. "I'm pregnant."

Sasuke's reaction was not the one I expected.

He let my hands go and pressed his palms over his eyes, exhaling very loudly. "Fucking hell, Sakura," he breathed, swore. When he took his hands away, he was palming at the corners of his eyes. He had been about to cry! I realized, my mouth falling partly open.

"Sasuke-kun?" I ventured carefully when he didn't speak again after several seconds, and almost yelped aloud when he descended on me and drew me into a deep, very involved kiss. I returned it and ended nestled in his arms, my face pressed into his shoulder. "Are _you_… okay?" I murmured.

"How long?" he asked, pushing me back gently. "How long have you known?"

"I suspected, for a while," I confessed, "but I attributed it to other factors, I just didn't consider it. I'm, well, I _thought_ I was past the age for child-bearing. Most women don't get pregnant this late in life. So I went and got a second opinion, because I was too scared to get my hopes up."

"And how far along are you?" he pressed.

"Close to three months." I spread my hands over my abdomen. "Knowing the state of denial I was in, the baby would have to have been kicking for me to realize what was going on." I laughed a little. "I can't believe how stupid I was."

Sasuke took that in and smirked. "Me too. How could _you_ not know?"

"Sasuke-kun!" I was outraged. "I just told you why I didn't think I was pregnant!"

He kept smirking until I slapped his arm. "Naruto is right, you really _are_ an asshole." I folded my arms imperiously. "I'm keeping it, so you know."

"Good, because you'd have had a fight on your hands if you'd decided not to."

I wanted to groan. "Have you not a romantic bone in your body? This is your first, isn't it?"

"After feeling like half a parent around Naruto most of the time," he muttered, "and with the boy now, this feels like this is my third."

"Still, you could pretend to be all happy and jumping around like an idiot." I paused and pictured that, shuddering. "On second thought, never mind." I watched Sasuke pick my hand up and caress my fingers and sighed again. "This is going to be a big change for us."

"We're both members of Team 7," he said suddenly, making me look up at him with wide, surprised eyes. "Since when have we not been able to handle big changes?"

I teared up for real now and began crying. Naruto would have loved to have heard him say that. "Sasuke-kun…"

Looking world-weary, Sasuke opened his arms. "Want to do that here, lest the children not see me comforting their crying mother and think ill of me?"

I laughed and fell into them. It was hard to believe that once upon a time this man used to make me cry… he still did, but now those moments more often than not ended with laughter. "You know, sometimes I love you so much I can't stand it," I told him, speaking the same words I spoke once so very long ago trying to reach the heart of a boy I feared about to become lost to me forever.

He smirked, and I saw that he still remembered them. "Thank you." Then he added, suddenly, "It's why I never could forget you."


	3. From the Memoirs of Haruno Sakura III

**From the Memoirs of Haruno Sakura III**

* * *

One of the things about becoming pregnant is dealing with how others react to the news. A man can become a father at any age and the most fazing reaction will usually be from the father himself. In the village of Konoha, a man expecting a first child at Sasuke's age wasn't anything to bat an eyelash at; a woman expecting a child at mine: it turned some heads.

I thought it was going to turn my daughter's head completely around.

"You're too old!" she'd exclaimed upon hearing the news. She had evidently decided to ignore my many years of having taught her about the amazing capabilities of the human body and its ability to defy the expectations of modern medicine. "You know what people are going to think when I cart around the thing in public?"

"Don't call it that,'" I interrupted. "The 'thing' is going to be your sibling."

"They're going to think it's _mine_!" she continued her outburst as if I had not spoken, pacing in front of me, while her boyfriend looked on nonchalantly from across the way. Thankfully his reaction had been encouraging: he'd cracked a wide, rare, smile and dealt a surprisingly robust slap to Sasuke's shoulder, a gesture my husband merely smirked at. A younger man giving _him_ props for his virility, you _bet_ Sasuke was glowing! I was disappointed my own daughter wasn't being so accommodating.

"So what if they think it's yours?" her former teammate objected. "Why do you care?"

My girl pinioned him with the death glare made so famous by me and inherited by her. "You'll care when you're with me and they think it's yours too."

"Oh." To his credit, he didn't turn as white as I feared. "Well, I don't think they will. Have you _seen_ those old photographs of the Uchiha clan? Rest assured, with strong genes like those, it's not going to look like either one of us."

My daughter made a frustrated noise. "Just for _once_ in your pathetic existence could you be on my side?"

"Oh no," he shot back drolly, "where would be the fun in that?"

"You are _such_ an asshole!" my daughter seethed through her teeth, stomping from the room and slamming out of the house. I cringed at the decibel of her exit, not daring to glance at my husband.

Her significant other merely shrugged with his hands and sat back against the couch. "One," he began, "two, three…" Then he pointed at the door.

On cue, it opened and my daughter poked her pink head in. "_What are you doing_?!" she demanded. "Come on!"

Her boyfriend ducked his head and turned his palms out in casual surrender, before he launched to his feet. He winked at our combined surprise. "Every time," he stated smugly, calmly following my spitting-with-cat's rage progeny out into the sunny afternoon. After the door shut behind them, I fell into the throes of helpless laughter. I felt the poking in my arm and turned to the man sitting beside me, a rather bewildered expression on his usually stoic face.

"Would you mind telling me what _that_ was about?" he asked.

"Oh Sasuke-kun," I grinned, "do I really need to tell you?"

"No." He leaned over and kissed my ear. "You never _need_ to tell me, you just _do_."

"I do not," I said indignantly.

"I beg to differ."

"_You_ beg?" I sniffed, sliding my hand over his thigh, gradually heading north, whispering seductively into the shell of his ear. "Hmm, I like that idea, actually. You do it-" I nipped his earlobe "-so well."

I yelped when Sasuke lifted me from the couch and started pulling me down the hall toward our bedroom, me grinning and unresisting the whole way.

"Where's the boy?" Sasuke asked, propelling me urgently over the threshold. Always the responsible one, even when his mind was on an impending midday quickie. I'd always loved that about him.

"At a friend's house," I said, latching the door securely, "under strict orders to be home in an hour."

"Too bad." Sasuke was shrugging out of his shirt.

"Oh?" I reached below and peeled up my dress from the hem up, taking it and the slip over my head in one practiced, graceful motion. Sasuke paused to watch, because it was _that_ elegant.

Away went the pants. "An hour isn't nearly long enough."

I lowered my gaze in a manner my husband found sultry, playfully spinning the last of my underwear across the room. "Hmm, it certainly isn't," I agreed.

Abruptly I splayed my hands on my husband's chest and gently pushed him toward the bed, and then I pushed him again, once, hard, so that he was lying flat on his back. He let me.

When it came to any kind of intimacy, Sasuke had enough trust issues to write a book thicker than my bicep, but when it came to handing his body over to me, there were no reservations whatsoever. He trusted me on a level far more than he had anyone else in his life. In spite of the terrible abuses others had made of their love for him, I had never betrayed mine for him.

"So when will we know if it's a boy or a girl?" he asked breathlessly, after the first round.

I threw an arm over my forehead, giving myself a moment to catch my own breath before responding. "I'm not sure… I can't think right now." I turned to look at him. "What do you want it to be?"

"Alive and healthy."

I smiled. "Me too… though, if I might be a little prejudiced, I'd prefer a boy."

He smiled, pleased, interested. "Yeah?"

"Mmm. Had a girl already… Besides I hear boys are easier."

"This from the girl who used to scream at her male teammates all the time for their idiocy?" he replied wryly.

I made a face at my husband. "Everyone knows you and Naruto weren't normal boys."

"We were perfectly normal boys, our being orphans notwithstanding." Sasuke propped himself up on one elbow, amazingly chatty. "Did Naruto ever tell you that we sometimes used to stay up in our tents nights during missions and speculate about girls?"

I shot him a dark look of complete disbelief. "You were distracted by revenge ninety-nine percent of the time, Sasuke-kun. I find that a little hard to believe."

"That left a one percent margin free for _other_ things to distract me…" Sasuke moved and hovered over me, caging me between his arms, "and girls _were_ one of them."

"Forgive me if I call bullshit on that one, sweetheart."

"You can call it whatever you want but it's true." He bent his head toward my neck, gently mouthing the skin there.

"All right." I humored him, closing my eyes under the heaven of his mouth. "Did you guys ever talk about me?"

Distracted from his nuzzling, Sasuke took up his head to briefly roll his eyes. "Naruto had a crush on you back then and wanted someone to bounce his inanities off of, _yes_ we talked about you," he replied very patiently. Sasuke pressed the tip of his index finger in the center of my forehead and traced it down over my nose, bumping, lingering over my lips, before continuing. "I happened to be a convenient target for his midnight speculations. He kept asking me if I liked you back. I always used to tell him no." At my visible dismay he smirked. "Sakura, it was _the middle of the night _after days of traveling on foot, what would _you_ have said to get a few hours of sleep?"

I chuckled and lifted my arms to wrap them around his shoulders. "Did you?"

He caught them and held them up above our heads, almost in a dance. "Did I what?"

"Like me." I laced our fingers together, the action swaying the movement of our arms, pinning mine over my head to the mattress.

He diverted attention from our play to give me an annoyed look.

I sighed, curling my fingers around his. "I just want to know."

"Why? We were kids. It doesn't matter."

"When you're a kid, everything matters, Sasuke-kun." I said. We both just gazed into each other's eyes for a few seconds. He watched me for a long time, considering. Then to my disappointment, he untangled our hands, moved over and lay beside me.

"At first, I didn't," he started at length, softly. "You irritated me in every way I didn't need. I didn't like it when you acted like I was this great hero when all I did was fail. I wanted to hate you so much and yet you were the only person I couldn't even muster the slightest negative feeling toward." He could no longer look at me now. "Even if I felt you liked me for all the wrong reasons, I still didn't want you to stop liking me. I needed you to care about me because there was no one left alive who did. I didn't know how to express that to you, except to thank you." Sasuke closed his eyes and pressed his body closer to mine, his face against my neck. "I know what I gave up in walking away from you, Sakura, so stop asking me about what that stupid kid thought back then, because I sure as hell don't care." He raised his head again, meeting my gaze, and then gently pressed a fingertip under my eye. "Sentimental old fool," he teased in a low rumble. "Haven't I made you cry enough today?"

I sniffed lightly and blinked the rest of my tears back. "It's just hormones."

"I'd believe that if I didn't know you."

"You're not a woman, how could you?"

Sasuke slid his hands north and covered my breasts with his hands, cradling both mounds in his hands generously. "If I were a woman, would we be having this conversation, like this?"

"Sure we would. Do you have any idea how hot you are? Put those looks on a female body and we'd all be done for."

My husband darkened and misunderstood my angle. "I am not henging into a woman, Sakura; we've had this conversation before. It is not going to happen. Get yourself a girlfriend if you like that sort of thing."

"Well, shoot." I pouted, pretending disappointment. "It was worth a shot." Then I fully absorbed the last thing my husband suggested. "I don't _like_ that sort of thing. I just would like to _see_ it. I already know what Naruto looks like… I think."

Sasuke froze and leveled me with the coldest glare ever. "You've seen Naruto naked."

"We all have. His sexy jutsu."

Exhaling loudly, Sasuke lifted his head, staring blankly at the wall. "I am actually having this conversation with you. I'm lying in bed with you and this is what we're talking about."

I giggled. "First time for everything, honey."

"Last time too. Now, shut up."

* * *

We were having lunch together at Ichiraku's, me paying as usual, when I dropped the news. Naruto thought I was trying to pull a prank on him.

"Look, Sakura-chan, if you want some vacation time, all you have to do is ask me," he chuckled. "I don't expect you to work like a dog during peace time, which this is, so don't you feel the need to make something up to get time off."

"I'm not making up anything. I can show you the stick."

"That piece of plastic you pee on? No thanks." He shoveled a spoonful of noodles into his mouth, glancing sideways at me. "Give me a little credit here. I'm _married_ and I have two kids, I know what a pregnancy test is!"

I folded my hands in my lap and merely looked at him. He stared at me back, the arch of his golden brow perplexed and worried. Gradually it dawned on him, and his big blue eyes grew big as saucers, consequently causing his mouth drop open, and the dumpling he'd been chewing to plop back into his bowl.

"Naruto, ew, that's disgusting," I chided without heat. It wasn't like he was _my_ husband.

He ignored my lazy rebuke at his lack of table manners. "Wait…" he exclaimed. "This is not an attempt to fuck with me? You're really pregnant?"

"If this was an attempt to fuck with you, dobe, I'd be the first one in line." Sasuke sat on the other side of his friend and gave him a single pat on the back before he sat down. At my questioning look, he said, "I figured you needed the reinforcement. I don't need him coming at me with this during our next spar."

"Pussy," Naruto muttered, slurping his ramen noisily.

Sasuke ignored him and flagged down the cook to place an order instead.

Naruto finished his bowl and then spun on his stool so he was directly facing me. "Are you sure?" I nodded. "Do you have all the necessary paperwork filled out, doctor's forms?" I kept nodding, my exasperation evident as I blew air between my lips. "I get it! I know you're the queen of this sector. I'm the Hokage; I've got to ask you this stuff. And _you_!" He spun on Sasuke, who was in the midst of breaking apart his disposable chop sticks. "Nice act of subterfuge, bastard, you took out the top med nin of Konoha without employing a single ninja technique. What do you have to say for yourself?"

"My kung fu is best." Sasuke twirled his noodles and dug in.

Naruto glowered at him. "I guess you'll be asking _me_ for time off as well?"

"No."

Naruto grinned.

Then Sasuke added: "I don't answer to you. I put in my papers for leave this afternoon and my captain already approved it."

Naruto nearly fell off his chair and groaned. He didn't like being reminded of Sasuke's new line of work. The police force had its own hierarchy and for those who served in it who weren't also ninja, there was a chain of command to follow. If Sasuke went over the captain's head to ask for leave from the Hokage, he'd have caused a lot of administrative problems. When all was said and done, with the way the Konoha police force ran itself, Naruto literally _could not give Sasuke an order_. He'd have had to issue it to the captain first. Privately I think Sasuke enjoyed that.

"Bet the other officers aren't letting you hear the end of it," Naruto teased, elbowing his old rival.

Sasuke shrugged, smirking. "They think I'm a hero, if that's what you mean. Got a lot of 'not bad old man's today." He appeared amused. "'Old man', when I could wipe the floor with any of those snot nosed twenty year olds in a second."

"Oh you poor thing," I muttered under my breath, rolling my eyes heavenward.

"Nobody asked for your opinion, Sakura," Sasuke shot back nonchalantly, his attention focused entirely on his food.

I peered round Naruto. "Too damn bad, _old man_, mine are free and unsolicited so long as we're married."

"Are you giving me incentive to divorce you?"

Naruto was looking back and forth between us, unease manifest on his bewhiskered expression. He sought to break whatever tension he sensed was growing. Reading atmospheres was not one of his strong suites. "Um, do you guys want me to leave? I feel like I'm caught in the prelude of a porno just before the main characters go at it on the kitchen floor."

As one, Sasuke and I dealt a blow to either side of the head of the most powerful man in Fire Country.

"Shit, you guys made me spill!" Naruto practically wailed. You'd have sworn he'd never aged beyond sixteen the way he carried on.

I tossed some napkins in his lap, slapped the money on the counter, and spoke round to my husband. "I've got to run an errand. Could you pick up the squirt from school?" He nodded, clearly not intending to budge from his stool until he'd finished his meal. Sasuke was inordinately fond of his food and never budged from the table until he'd cleaned his plate, a quirk I found both frustrating and endearing. I kissed him on the cheek fondly, murmuring grateful noises, and went on my way. Behind me, I heard Naruto rib Sasuke about something, prompting my husband to retort, "If that were true, you wouldn't be here at a ramen stand hiding from her."

"Oh, shut up," was the withering response.

I reflected then on how truly amazing these two men were, having lived through the things they did, with all that fell between them to rip their brotherhood asunder. Naruto especially, yet there shouldn't have been any surprises there. He'd given the appearance of having let go Sasuke all these long years and behaved indifferently toward the subject of him. The second he showed his face in Konoha, Naruto immediately jumped on the chance to renew old ties with our long lost teammate. He was wary at first, as he ought to have been, but it soon faded when Sasuke agreed to every request to spend time together that he made. It ultimately made him decide that giving Sasuke a second chance was more than a trial test run on trust.

In the beginning when the Council made denigrating objections to his presence, Sasuke said nothing to them, standing silently in the back of the meeting room, while Naruto practically threw himself on the chopping block to defend him. "If you kick him out, you'll have to kick me out too!" was his inelegant, thoughtless, emotional ending outburst to the combined silence of his Council of peers and clan representatives.

"Promise?" Kiba snorted, clearly trying to hold back a guffaw. Naruto glared at him.

Hinata closed her fingers over her lips and looked away politely.

Shikamaru glanced round the room, saw he had unanimously been picked to speak for them all, and stood up to speak. "Listen, Naruto, if you tell us he's a changed man, I believe you. We actually can't vote on something like this. What we _can_ decide is if he can join the Council and I think I speak for all of us when we say we _would_ like to very much have him sit with us… we just need reassurance he _is_ with us, if you understand what I mean."

Everyone was nodding. I looked down at the table. At the time, I was too biased to chime in my agreement, but I also shared their sentiments and concerns. From across the room, I felt Sasuke's gaze rest on me. I caught his eye and gave him a small smile. He sucked in his lower lip and looked away, reddening just a bit. Ino, who was also present, noticed the exchange and ribbed me about it later. I denied her teasing insinuations with a bloom in both cheeks.

In the end, Sasuke declined on representing the Uchiha clan, as he felt with their bloody history with the village, he couldn't in good faith represent what was at best only a memory. He wanted to book end his clan's legacy with quiet dignity in his own way.

"I'm retired," he told the rest of the room, "and no one is more relieved of that fact than me."

I emerged from my reminiscing when I reached my destination. I gazed perfunctorily at the sign.

KONOHA CEMETARY

I walked down the familiar gentle curves bisecting the rows of grave stones and family plots, nearly whispering the number of steps I was taking with each foot fall. I did this ritual playfully, almost cheerfully. Finally I reached the little plot in the back most area, the newly mown loam sweet in my nostrils, the green of the grass becoming under the bright sunny sky. It was a new plot, purchased beside an older one, the graves bearing the names of my parents, grandparents, and great grand parents. There were a few uncles and aunts and a cousin who had died at birth. I stopped first at these graves, pausing before the ones of my parents for a few minutes, before I finally moved on to the last marker at the end of the plot. It was the only one that did not bear the Haruno name.

But it was how he had wanted it, I smiled approaching it. My first husband hadn't known his parents. They'd died when he was three on the same mission so he'd never known their faces outside of photographs. He wanted to be buried with the family _he_ had known and loved: Mine.

I knelt on the cushy, springy grass, sweeping my skirts between my legs. I folded my hands in my lap and gave the name stamped before me a crooked smile. "Hey. Bet you didn't expect me to show up today." I winked at the marker as if he were sitting alive in front of me. "You know what I always liked to tell you: 'I got some moves too.' Well, I've got another one for you." I spread my hands theatrically. "I'm pregnant!" Then I smiled sadly and touched his name. "Our daughter isn't very happy, though. Maybe she's already told you about it. I… wish she were. It bothers me more than I want to admit." I dropped my gaze to my lap, absently twisting around a piece of grass between my fingers. "I need her to be okay with this. It never sits right with me to be at odds with her. I don't know how to handle this." I lowered my head, exhaling slowly. "I know, why aren't I telling Sasuke about this? He knows… I just don't want to burden him with it. He's thrilled with the baby… happier than I've seen him about anything, really." I took a deep breath. "This is the part where you make some stupid joke to make me laugh."

"_I'm dead, honey, there ain't nothing I can do anymore, not that I did much of anything when I was alive anyway."_

I burst into giggles, imagining his face as he would have said it, adding in a wink. I found myself remembering the first time I met my first husband. It was after my final bout in the Jounin exams. I had retreated into the shade off to the side, tending to my injuries, and hydrating, listening to the sounds of the crowd in the stadium. I was thinking I would change my clothes and retreat indoors to cool off before going off with the other competitors to watch the last fight. I was patting my face with a towel when I heard someone whistle from the stands above and behind me. I ignored it at first, thinking it didn't have anything to do with me, until an empty plastic cup beaned my head. It didn't hurt, of course, but it irritated me plenty. I turned and glanced up, searching for the culprit. He wasn't making it hard for me to pick him out. A young man my age was leaning over the crowd barrier and grinning. He was a ninja; that much I could tell from his forehead protector and, from the pleased expression on his handsome face, his goal of gaining my attention had been accomplished.

We locked eyes for a while, until finally I grew tired of waiting, and put a hand on my hip. His grin grew. "Hey, what's your name?" he asked cheerfully.

I raised an eyebrow, already losing interest in the exchange. "They announced it before my match, unless you weren't paying attention."

"I was in the john, so no, I didn't hear it, actually. So… name?"

"Haruno Sakura."

He repeated it and then gave me his. "Would it be completely weird if I asked you out?"

"Yes, actually, it would be completely weird."

He shrugged. "I can live with that. So when are you free?"

"That wasn't a yes."

"It wasn't a no either."

Annoyed, I folded my arms over my chest. "I'm kind of in the middle of something here."

"I can see that. I meant, after."

I stalled. "I'll think about it."

"Think faster, then," he pointed at the judges stands, "they're going to announce the next match soon."

Two could play that game. "Oh, well, then maybe I'll just say no right now and cut my losses then, if you're going to be that impatient." I flung my towel over my shoulder and smirked at him, thinking I was thwarting him wonderfully. Instead I saw the attraction bloom even more in his dark eyes and the smile temper to one more genuine than the flirty one he'd been giving me.

"Take all the time you need," he only said, throwing me a wink. "I'll be waiting for your answer."

"Take a number then, you'll be waiting a while." I started to walk away to rejoin the other competitors.

"That's all right," he called after me, "something tells me you'll be worth the wait!"

I slapped a hand over my burning face, unable to believe this man had shouted that out to be heard by everyone within earshot. I endeavored to hurry to get out of sight, and I had hoped at the time, out of mind.

But he never gave up. I don't know what it was about me that so drew him to me in the beginning. I could tell he was hooked from the way he looked at me and I just couldn't see why. He was a med nin too, though much greener than I was, and so I wound up on more than on occasion having to play mentor to him, especially when the inevitable emergency would pop up and the rookies were needed to provide back up. I was impressed with him: for all his pursuing, he was a total professional, very talented, and kept the flirting off the battle field. There wasn't a day that didn't go by I didn't hear from him in some way. Sometimes he just wanted to talk and share a cup of tea, which I was fine with, as at the time I kept my feelings closed, arguing with myself my interest in him was neutral and in no way reciprocal.

In the end, it proved impossible. He made me laugh, his kind presence brightened my day, and when some days were harder to deal with than usual, I found myself going to his place and knocking on his door. He was as patient with me as he'd claimed to be the day we met, and the day he broke down and told me he was in love with me, I heard myself saying it back, and realizing it was true. I wanted to spend the rest of my life with this man.

I stood and silently reached out and laid my hand on top of the headstone in farewell, smiling. I told his spirit, in case it was listening. "I'll see you again soon."

It's interesting the way things turn out, I thought walking out of the cemetery that day. Sasuke owned my heart and soul like no one else ever would… Sometimes I wondered what if my first husband had been alive when Sasuke decided to come home, what I would have done.

Nothing, I decided easily. Sasuke would not have pursued a married woman and I wouldn't even have thought about reviving my old feelings. We would have been only friends.

But it would have bothered me to see him with another woman, I realized with a bitter bit of self-searching, not liking what I found buried there. How selfish would that have been?

I shook my head, resolving to quit thinking about things that didn't– and would never - happen. The past was the past. Everything happened for a reason and while I may not agree or like how it did, I accepted life in its turn, no matter what path I wound up on. If wherever I was going made me happy, it was all that mattered.

By the time I reached the path leading up to my home, I saw my daughter coming down the lane to meet me. She stopped half way and we stared at one another for a moment, before she charged up to me, and pulled me into a hug.

"I'm sorry, Mom," she whispered, a hitch in her breath. "I'm sorry…"

I returned her embrace with warm affection, feeling the unconditional adoration a mother feels for her child well up within me. "It's all right." I pulled back to look her in the face, marveling at how beyond lucky I was to have a daughter like her. I palmed away the tears from her cheeks as if she were still a child, smiling gently at her. "Let's move past this. It's us, we can do that." She smiled and nodded. I slipped my arm around her and her me and we walked back to the house together.

* * *

During my first pregnancy, I dealt with more inexplicabilities about my own body than I could have imagined possible. I found out firsthand why kunoichi went on leave when they discovered they were having a baby: chakra was impossible to regulate or maintain. Developing fetuses fed on chakra about as much as they did the nutrients the mother's body supplied. Some days I had enough to mold to run up a tree, others I couldn't even feel a single flow through my channels. On top of the whole host of ailments and moods I was afflicted with, feeling my own body turn against me for the sake of the child in my womb had not been the pleasant feeling I'd anticipated childbearing would foster. The day I gave birth to my daughter was the happiest day of my life, because it meant not only was I a mother at last, I was free of this chakra sucking monster.

Yes, sweetheart, if you're reading this, that is exactly what I thought you were at the time. I believe it to be proportionate to the amount of love I wound up feeling for you, and still do, so I won't apologize. You got away with so much more than you should have in your youth and don't you think I'll ever forget that!

But this pregnancy, while it carried all of the usual hall marks of my first, was easier to handle. Because I knew what to expect I was able to prepare for it head on this time. I made sure Sasuke was properly prepped so he wouldn't run at the first sign of horns growing out of my hair. He put up with far more crap from me than he should have. I'm ashamed to admit on one occasion, three months later at six months, I felt so overwhelmed, I called him every name in the book, and a few other incoherent accusations.

I remember he just stood there and watched me impassively rant, not reacting until I put my finger in his face, and started on a new line of invective that lit the Sharingan in his good eye, and he grasped my wrist firmly, yanking me forward until our faces were inches apart.

"Shut up," he ordered me coldly, startling me speechless. "If you were anyone else, I'd tell you to fuck off. I do not care if you're upset right now, you do not get to scream in my face like that." He released my wrist and stepped away from me, the motion very deliberate. "Now I'm going to the store and picking up a few things you need and when I get back, you're going to behave like a civil human being. If not, you sleep alone tonight." The Sharingan faded. Then he just turned and walked out of the house. He could have slammed the door to accentuate his point, but the fact he did it softly only drove the point home for me. I was such a selfish bitch, I thought, why did I have to be like that to him? He took time off he didn't need to take to help me through my pregnancy and I reward that by spitting on it?

I cried for a little while, caressing my swelling womb, hating myself, until I was done. I wiped away all the tears and snot and went into the kitchen, intent on making my husband a nice hot pot of his favorite tea. By this time, I heard the front door crash open and a rapid thudding of feet across the floorboards. I turned to the sound, happy for the distraction young children provided for adult misery. I was eternally grateful for the exultations of my daughter's explosively excited appearances during the darker moments of my life, and now with my adopted son, I was finding solace in them once again.

"Sakura, Sakura!" the little boy burst into the kitchen, grinning, stopping just short of blundering into me, his eyes going to the ball of my belly. He gently embraced me, patting my baby bump absently with his small hand. "I'm home!"

I leaned over much as I could to level with him and smiled at his sweet face. "You certainly are. What did you learn today?"

He jumped over to the table and urged me to sit by pulling open a chair. I obliged, relieved to take the pressure off my feet. He'd watched his brother do this for a pregnant cousin all the time, he told me, and she always smiled and thanked him for it, so he figured I'd like it too. He tended to model a lot of his behavior on his late older brother's, and I found myself wishing I could have met the young man who'd died so bravely protecting his little brother. I liked to think, in a way, I already knew him.

He prattled off right away everything he'd learned, showing me some new fighting stances, and hand seals, blushing when I made mild corrections to a few of his enthusiastic demonstrations. "Sa-ku-_ra_," he complained after I'd pointed to his feet to correct his stance, "it doesn't _matter_ how you stand, it's that it works!"

"It _does_ matter how you stand," I disagreed. "You could fall over your own feet and then you'd be dead. You have to distribute your weight evenly."

"What's 'distribute' mean?" he asked, and after I'd explained, he pouted a bit. "Will I _ever_ know more than you?"

"I'm afraid not." I was smiling. "At least not yet."

He fell silent, appearing to think about something. "I have a question." Curiously he just stopped and watched me expectantly until I nodded. "It's not about school," he elaborated dipping his head shyly. "I mean, it's not about jutsus or anything."

"Okay." I waited.

He took a deep breath, turning just a bit pink. "There's this girl in my class. She throws stuff at me all the time and calls me names. She trips me when we run laps and at lunch she steals the dessert right out of my hand while I'm eating it! I try to ignore her but it's hard not to… and I know you told me to be nice to girls but…" He covered his face with his hands and confessed his ultimate humiliation. "Today I couldn't take it anymore and I pulled on her hair and she screamed really loud and the instructor made me sit in the corner and then do forty push ups."

"Wow," I blurted after a long moment, correcting myself when he peered oddly up at me. "Did you apologize?"

"The teacher made me. I didn't mean it, though." The boy stuck out his lower lip. "She deserved it!"

"I'm sure you thought she did. So, what was your question?"

"How do I make her leave me alone?"

The question for the ages! I didn't want to offer solutions that probably would fail – after all, I didn't know this girl, and this was the first I was hearing of this. My first hunch was she was acting out on my boy because she liked him and, in the way of children, couldn't think of any other way to express that. It seemed always of two ways girls and boys reacted to each other: if one liked the other, they either treated that person kindly, or found every opportunity under the sun to make their lives miserable.

Suffice to say, I had no answer for the beseeching of my child, and simply decided to have him deal with the girl as if she were a bully. "Don't let her get the best of you. What she is looking for is to make you react. Ignore her when you can and defend yourself when you need to. You're only what she says you are if you believe it."

"I _don't_ believe it," he declared bluntly, the solidity in his eyes showing me he was completely confident of what he was saying. "She's _wrong_."

"I know she is." I gazed on him with unmodified affection. "As long as you believe in yourself, nobody can touch you."

"You and Sasuke believe in me," he added, "my big sister believes in me and…" He patted my stomach. "So will he, when he decides to come out."

I smirked. "You still think it's a boy, don't you?"

The boy puffed his chest out. "It is."

I gently balanced my chin on my knuckles. "What if it's a girl?" I asked playfully.

"It's _not_ a girl." He glanced at my stomach and then up at me a bit nervously. "Um, I know it's a boy. I mean, like I _know_." His odd behavior started to worry me and his next admission floored me. "His chakra is a boy's chakra. Boys have different chakra from girls."

I immediately dove into my memory banks, searching them. His clan had been renowned for many extraordinary abilities, cultivating their bloodline and honing talents that were passed down genetically. I recalled reading something about sensor types. Perhaps our boy was developing some sensing ability, one that could differentiate between male and female chakra? I would have to discuss this with Sasuke later and look up the family histories.

I pointed to the chair across from me. "Talk to me, hon."

He hesitated, glancing at the chair and then at me. "You're not mad?"

I smiled. "I'm not mad."

"But I spoiled the surprise."

"It's okay. Now I know what to buy for the baby's room. Tell me about boy's and girl's chakras. What do they feel like to you?"

He pulled himself into the chair and once he ascertained I was interested in what he had to say, he dove right in and started describing the things he sensed, what he felt, how he sorted them out. I took a lot of mental notes, and found myself asking a lot of questions. I was rather amazed how he handled the more complicated questions I asked. I rarely had to clarify what I was asking him, though we did have to pause a few times so I could define any word he didn't understand the meaning of. We were still going strong by the time Sasuke arrived home, and the boy immediately slid off the chair to go greet him, our discussion promptly forgotten.

Many minutes later Sasuke entered the kitchen with a bag he set down on the abandoned drawn out chair. I kept my hands in my lap along with my gaze. I didn't move or look up until my husband came around the table and hooked my chair with his foot to push me out further so he could face me better. Then he leaned down and kissed me on my mouth briefly, pausing to mutter an order: "Smile." I bit my lips and turned my head. He wouldn't let me. "You're not allowed to sulk, Sakura, as your husband, I forbid it." I fought back a giggle unsuccessfully. He smirked and drew back, satisfied with his handiwork. "Good. I would have hated to have resorted to more drastic measures."

I folded my arms over my chest. "Oh yeah?" I couldn't help retorting. "Against a pregnant woman? Bring it on."

He moved back over to the other side of the table to unpack the fruits of his journey to the market.

When he didn't respond, I wilted. "Well, darn. Guess I'll just have to live with the disappointment then. I would have loved to have seen what you'd have done."

Sasuke paused in his unloading the bag, cutting me with a shrewd stare. "You enjoy needling me far too much. One day you will discover the limits of my patience."

"And what, be sorry?" I huffed and sat back in my chair, absently laying one hand over the ball of my belly. "Too late for that one, I am sorry already. Sorry, and hungry. What did you bring me?"

Sasuke answered by setting down the small carton in front of me. It was chocolate ice cream. Next to it he set down a jar of pickles. I made an embarrassing little squeak of excitement and seized the jar, immediately twisting it open.

"Your cravings frighten me," my husband opined drolly, watching me cut up a pickle into round slices and then mix it in with the ice cream in a bowl with morbid fascination. "Common sense tells me I should stop you yet self-preservation prevents me."

I beamed proudly at him. "Smart man."

He kept watching. "You better not throw any of that crap up. I mean it. Bad enough you do that even when you don't eat anything." He finally looked up at me, looking really, really unsettled. "You're… not planning on adding anything else to that, right?"

I bit my lips together to contain the howling laughter which desperately wanted to escape them. "Maybe."

"Like what?" he asked, even though it was clear he didn't want to know.

"Oh, lots of things. Pepper, cayenne, bread crumbs, ketchup, ramen noodles…"

Sasuke looked ill. "I'm begging you to stop."

I tittered and tucked in. Sasuke immediately stood up from the table, grabbed a pickle, and proceeded to leave the kitchen.

"It's not that bad!" I called out after him. "You're overreacting!"

"You're not normal!" I was surprised to hear him yell back. "Hey, tell her she's not normal." He was talking to the boy, who he apparently had encountered between rooms.

"Why?"

"I'm eating pickles and ice cream!" I called back helpfully.

"Eeeew! Yuck!" groaned the boy.

I grinned and happily snarfed down my treat, ignoring the world around me.


End file.
